Lord of the Flies by William Golding

The next morning, Ralph finds that only Piggy, Samneric, and some littluns remain in his camp. Brooding over the previous night’s events, he points out to Piggy that they murdered Simon. Piggy objects to the use of the term “murder” and doesn’t want Samneric to know that he and Ralph were at least somewhat involved in the deadly dance. Samneric don’t want to admit their own involvement, either.

Jack begins acting ever more like a cruel dictator to his own tribe members, having one of the boys tied up and beaten for angering him. He plans a raid on Ralph’s camp to get fire for another pig roast and tries to convince his uneasy followers that they had beaten but not killed the beast the previous night. The beast had come to them in disguise, he asserts, in utter denial that they had killed one of their former group.

Back at Ralph’s camp, the boys decide to let the fire die for the night rather than collect more wood in the dark. Because Jack and his raiders can’t steal burning branches, they attack Ralph’s group and steal Piggy’s glasses.

Commentary

This chapter reveals the boys’ responses to their actions of the night before, when they beat Simon to death in a tribal frenzy. Ralph is the only character who names the deed as murder and has a realistic, unvarnished view of his participation. Back at the platform, he takes a seat in front of the chief’s log rather than on it and contemplates the horror of what they’ve done. He feels both loathing and excitement over the kill he witnessed, as Jack experienced the first time he killed a pig. He shudders at Piggy’s touch on his shoulder; humanity has let him down. Putting the pieces together, he recalls the parachuted figure drifting off the night before and Simon’s shouting about a dead man on the mountain, musing that the life-like figure they saw on the mountaintop might have been the dead paratrooper rather than an actual animal-beast. Getting to the heart of the matter, he says, “I’m frightened. Of us.”

Although he initially owns up to his active role in the fatal dance, as a defense mechanism, Ralph willingly takes the opportunity Piggy gives him to deny full participation, entering into a sort of functional denial. When Piggy reminds Ralph that he himself remained on the outside of the circle, Ralph tries to amend his position as well, now claiming that he, too, was on the outside of the circle and so could not have done as much damage as the boys in the inner ring.

Piggy is in full-fledged denial of anyone’s responsibility, unable to process the death without blaming Simon for his seemingly odd behavior. Ever the pragmatist, Piggy complains, “What good’re you doing talking like that?” when Ralph brings up the highly charged issue of Simon’s death at their hands. True, his involvement is somewhat limited; as Ralph mentions, Piggy stayed on the outside of the circle. Golding doesn’t provide a reason as to why Piggy remained on the outside, whether his position was due to his physical inability to make his way into the inner circle or whether he simply wasn’t able to tap into the animality of the more physically abled boys or both. Golding, however, does include Piggy in the damning description of the boys as they sit on the platform that morning, with the sun shining on their “befouled bodies.”

Piggy tries to keep life scientific and intellectual, despite the previous night’s emotionally charged incident, “searching for a formula” to explain the death. He asserts that the assault on Simon was justifiable because Simon asked for it by inexplicably crawling out of the forest into the ring. Piggy, of course, is unaware that Simon had to crawl because his visionary confrontation with the true beast had so weakened him.

In responding to the death, Jack takes an entirely different direction from logic or common sense, in direct conflict with the actual events they had all witnessed. Perhaps acting out of some guilt he is unable to acknowledge, Jack becomes paranoid, posting guards at the entrance to the castle rock area in case any of Ralph’s tribe tries to enter. One of the boys questions this concern and Jack replies, “They’ll try to spoil things we do.” Ironically, he is also taking the part of the true beast, the Lord of the Flies, who told Simon not to try and stop the “fun” that was going to take place on the island.

The entrance guards serve another purpose as well—to protect the tribe from the beast. Jack tells his tribe that they did not, in fact, kill the beast, just beat it as it came in disguise. Therefore, they still need to appease it and be on the alert. He prescribes their reality now as he had dictated their dreams and emotions in the previous chapter. This technique for truth control is standard in tyrannical regimes. Because none of the boys want to admit their participation in the “obscene” dance, they allow Jack to dictate their reality. They find comfort in his overbearing authority, as if he can protect them from their indefinable fears through strength of his personality alone. More concretely, Jack offers them the protection of weaponry and an instinct for warfare. When Roger sees the boulder that stands ready to crush interlopers at the entrance to Castle Rock, he deems Jack “a proper chief” because he’s got weaponry, the makings of war.

For a sadist like Roger, joining the tribe offers him the chance to unleash his cruelty amidst Jack’s reign of “irresponsible authority.” All his life, Roger has been conditioned to leash or mask his impulses, as evidenced by his inability to actually hit Henry with the stones in Chapter 4. Hearing that Jack has had Wilfred arbitrarily bound and left to wait hours for punishment strikes a responsive chord in Roger. By the end of the next chapter, he carves out a distinct niche in the tribe as the hangman, the torturer who plays a key role in all dictatorships.

Jack doesn’t consider himself “a chief … in truth” until he accomplishes the theft of Piggy’s glasses. In this way, Jack symbolizes a twisted Prometheus, stealing fire from the humans to profit the savages as opposed to stealing from the gods to benefit humans. Note that originally he and his group of choirboys were to play the role of Prometheus in maintaining the fire, maintaining a visual plea to civilization for rescue and quick return home.

Ralph’s connection with his civilized self fades even more rapidly now, although he fights to maintain it and is baffled by the “curtain” that seems to fall when he tries to stress the importance of the fire. When the twins question the value of keeping the fire lit, Ralph “tried indignantly to remember. There was something good about a fire.” Piggy, of course, instantly knows what this good is, as his connection to civilization remains very strong because it offers him protection that is lacking on the island.

Piggy is so intent on preserving some remnant of civilization on the island that he not only remains loyal to Ralph but to the concept of civilized discourse represented by the conch. He assumes, improbably enough, that Jack’s raiders have attacked them to get the conch. Just as he takes for granted that Ralph has not lost his focus on rescue and home, he figures that Jack still places a value on what the conch represents when obviously Jack has abandoned all that, preferring the life of savagery. Jack’s leadership is based on fear; he has abandoned the conch for the dance.

The loss of his glasses to the savages literally renders Piggy more helpless and ineffectual and symbolically deprives Ralph of his intellectual counselor. The alert reader understands that Piggy will be the next victim.

Glossary