Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Ralph angers Jack by telling Piggy that even Jack would hide if the beast attacked them. In retaliation, Jack attempts his most serious mutiny yet, trying to convince the other boys to impeach Ralph. When the boys refuse to openly vote against Ralph, Jack announces his defection and runs off into the forest.

Simon suggests they all go face whatever’s on the mountain, but no one wants to go. Piggy, glad that Jack is gone, suggests they build a signal fire on the beach so that they won’t have to go up the mountain. While everyone gathers wood, most of the biguns creep away to join Jack. Simon disappears as well, going to his hidden spot in the forest to rest after his unsuccessful address to the group. Piggy starts the fire with his glasses.

Meanwhile Jack leads another successful hunt, attacking and killing a nursing sow and then impaling her head on a stick as an offering to the beast, coincidentally in full view of the spot where Simon sits concealed. Simon hallucinates, thinking that the head is talking to him, until he loses consciousness.

To get fire for a pig roast, Jack stages a theft of some burning branches from the beach fire and invites Ralph’s group to the roast in an attempt to recruit them to join his tribe. Ralph tries to rally his group to his side but loses his train of thought when he tries to remember the importance of being rescued, causing them to doubt him briefly.

Commentary

Ralph speaks realistically when he tells Piggy that even Jack would hide if the beast attacked; after all, the night before Jack had been as terrified as the other two boys when he saw the dead paratrooper. Jack cannot accept this realistic view of himself. In defense, he offers to the group a rationale for impeaching Ralph—“He’d never have got us meat,” as if hunting skills make for an effective leader. Noting that “He isn’t a prefect and we don’t know anything about him” opens up speculation about Ralph’s qualifications as a leader.

Jack further condemns Ralph as one who talks rather than one who gets results, but Ralph himself has long ago lost patience with talk, finding it an ineffective and inappropriate tool for their situation. His position on the usefulness of rhetoric is clear in his response to Jack’s assembly. “‘Talk,’ said Ralph bitterly, ‘Talk, talk, talk.’”

Reluctant to vote openly against Ralph, the boys sneak off to join Jack and return only when masked by their new tribal war paint, which has a liberating effect. Jack so loses himself in this liberation that, symbolizing the casting off of all social and civil encumbrances, he abandons clothing altogether, wearing only his paint and his knife when he presents his invitation to Ralph’s group. “He was safe from shame or self-consciousness behind the mask of his paint.”

Jack strives to be a chief in some grand fashion seen in a book or a movie, evidenced by the bizarrely formal announcement and flourish he makes Maurice and Robert perform once he has spoken to Ralph’s group. Little does he realize he himself is fulfilling the role of the beast. Wrapped up in the caveman-like activities of hunting, face-painting, and chest-beating disguised as addresses to the assembly, Jack doesn’t feel the need for rescue and so distracts the other boys from keeping the fire lit. He tells the assembly “Yes. The beast is a hunter” without taking a moment to reflect that perhaps the hunter is the beast.

Having lost and been wounded by the powerful, aggressive boar in the previous chapter, Jack chooses now to attack a defenseless sow who is vulnerable while she nurses her piglets—an act of supreme cruelty. The sow’s death and disfigurement marks the triumph of evil and the climax of the novel. Jack’s selection of the vulnerable sow arises from his defeated attempt to depose Ralph and foreshadows his later actions. While he couldn’t impeach Ralph openly and was wounded emotionally in the attempt, he can defeat him by killing the defenseless boys in his tribe, Piggy and Simon.

Voices can be a tool of evil as well. In the previous chapter, Jack’s voice came unidentified out of the darkness like the devil’s voice. While his choirboys-turned-hunters prepare unknowingly in this chapter to commit cruelty against their former friends and group members by joining Jack, Golding points out for contrast that “their voices had been the song of angels” back in civilization. Now they take part in slaughtering a mother pig and putting her head on a stake, offering it to the supposed beast while “The silence accepted the gift.”

Note that when the sow’s head speaks to Simon, it takes on a male voice, becoming the Lord of the Flies. Interestingly, Piggy and the Lord of the Flies both give the same answer to the same question, although they each phrase it slightly differently. Ralph asks Piggy “what makes things break up like they do?” and receives the reply “I dunno. I expect it’s him … Jack.” Meanwhile Simon hears the staked head tell him, “You knew, didn’t you? … I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?” The Lord of the Flies, a literal translation of the Greek word Beelzebub, symbolizes evil, and Jack is evil personified. Piggy’s assessment of the problem is actually much tamer in intent, based not on a consideration of evil but what he terms a lack of common sense (reason).

True to Piggy’s assertion that “It’s them that haven’t no common sense that make trouble on this island,” Jack doesn’t seem to have much common sense. He dictates to his hunters that they forget the beast and stop having nightmares, as if either mental process could be controlled on command. Piggy has a more rational solution to their situation, one that actually requires more courage on the boys’ part than Jack’s foolishly unrealistic demands. “We just got to go on, that’s all. That’s what grownups would do.” Ralph wishes he could think more like a grownup, impressed with Piggy’s astuteness in noting that Samneric need to take separate shifts in tending the fire rather than taking their turn together. Piggy and Ralph rely on adult behavior as a model because they still maintain the image of grownups as eminently capable and reasonable. They equate adulthood with knowledge and higher understanding.

In a way, Simon shares the same perception but sees the darker side of knowledge. He sees the sow’s eyes as “dim with the infinite cynicism of adult life” and later hears the head speak with a schoolmaster’s voice, telling him to accept the presence of evil on the island. This view of adults is not defined by the civilized politeness and capability the boys imagined just two nights before, after the assembly. Cynicism results from gaining experience while losing optimism; having witnessed the pig’s slaughter and defacement has given Simon experience in death and brutality and caused him to lose hope. Yet he soldiers on in his quest to discover the identity of the beast on the mountain top, the beast he knows is false because he has just had a conversation with the true beast.

Just as Piggy and Simon seem to share an idea about the cause of the island society’s disintegration, Simon and Jack have similar revelations as well. During the first successful hunt in Chapter 4, Jack is excited by “the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig.” In this chapter, Simon’s “gaze was held by that ancient, inescapable recognition” as he looks upon the Lord of the Flies. Both boys are connecting with the savagery that begets evil, but Jack revels in it while Simon is undone by it, trapped by his vision of the Lord of the Flies in his hidden spot until he passes out.

Another concept related to this knowledge of savagery is a twist on the idea of fun. From the beginning, Ralph’s goal for the group was for everyone to have fun. Such a goal did not seem farfetched given that the boys were on a pristine tropical island, the type featured in the adventure stories they all had read. Once Jack defects and lures his hunters away, he also promises fun, the kind that comes with dressing up like savages and having adventurous hunts. Although Jack may not realize the fun he is promising will turn into deadly cruelty, Simon knows that Jack holding a position of power can have only ill effects for the more vulnerable boys like Piggy, the littluns, and himself. Simon hears the Lord of the Flies say, “We’re going to have fun on this island! So don’t try it on … or else.” Now the offer to have fun is a threat, with the Lord of the Flies warning Simon not to try stopping the consequences of Jack’s new regime but to accept the savagery that will overtake the island.

Ralph responds to the defection of the hunters with increasing despair. Wishing he could think more like an adult, he turns to Piggy for advice and insight. Piggy keeps alive the fire when he has the “intellectual daring” to suggest maintaining a fire on the beach instead of on the mountain. During the small assembly held after rebuilding the fire, Piggy prompts Ralph when he forgets what he was going to say. By reminding him of rescue and thinking to move the fire, Piggy is fighting for his survival with his intellect just as Jack looks to conquer with physicality. In the end, Ralph will have to combine both physical abilities and brains to outrun Jack’s tribe. For now, Ralph relies on Piggy for hope and for answers.

Earlier, Simon asked the boys a question so fundamental that they couldn’t answer it: “What else is there to do?” In a way, the boys spend the rest of the book responding to this question but never in the way Simon wants them to. He sees the need to face their fears, to approach the beast on the mountain in daylight in order to understand its true identity and get on with the business of facing the beast within themselves. Instead, the others respond with various avoidance methods: Jack offering a libation, a head on a stake, Ralph moving the fire to the beach, Piggy advocating a pragmatic perseverance. Their responses are indicative of each boy’s character: Jack focuses on the concrete action of a primitive offering, Ralph wants to keep the home fire burning, and Piggy remains devoted to logic and realism.

Glossary