Plot
Overview
Lord of the Flies explores the
dark side of humanity, the savagery that underlies even the most civilized
human beings. William Golding intended this novel as a tragic parody
of children's adventure tales, illustrating humankind's intrinsic evil nature.
He presents the reader with a chronology of events leading a group of young
boys from hope to disaster as they attempt to survive their uncivilized,
unsupervised, isolated environment until rescued.
In the midst of a raging nuclear war,
a plane evacuating a group of schoolboys from Britain is shot down over a
deserted tropical island. They find themselves stranded without adult
supervision on the island. The group is roughly divided into the
"littluns," boys around the age of six, and the "biguns,"
who are between the ages of ten and twelve. Initially, the boys attempt to form
a culture similar to the one they left behind.
The story begins with the two of the
boys, Ralph and Piggy who discover a conch shell on the beach, and
Piggy realizes it could be used as a horn to summon the other boys. Once
assembled, the boys set about electing a leader and devising a way to be
rescued. They choose Ralph as their leader, and Ralph appoints another boy, Jack,
to be in charge of the group of choirboys-turned-hunters who will hunt food for
the entire group.
Ralph, Jack, and another boy, Simon,
set off on an expedition to explore the island. When they return, Ralph with
the advice and support of Piggy (the intellectual of the group),
strives to establish rules for housing and sanitation. He declares that they
must light a signal fire to attract the attention of passing ships. The boys
succeed in igniting some dead wood by focusing sunlight through the lenses of
Piggy’s eyeglasses. However, the boys pay more attention to playing than to
monitoring the fire, and the flames quickly engulf the forest. A large swath of
dead wood burns out of control, and one of the youngest boys in the group
disappears, presumably having burned to death.
At first, the boys enjoy their life
without grown-ups and spend much of their time splashing in the water and
playing games. Ralph, however, complains that they should be maintaining the
signal fire and building huts for shelter. The hunters fail in their attempt to
catch a wild pig, but their leader, Jack, becomes increasingly preoccupied with
the act of hunting.
When a ship passes by on the horizon
one day, Ralph and Piggy notice, to their horror that the signal fire which had
been the hunters’ responsibility to maintain has burned out. Furious, Ralph
accosts Jack, but the hunter has just returned with his first kill, and all the
hunters seem gripped with a strange frenzy, re-enacting the chase in a kind of
wild dance. Piggy criticizes Jack, who hits Piggy across the face. Ralph blows
the conch shell and reprimands the boys in a speech intended to restore order.
At the meeting, it quickly becomes
clear that some of the boys have started to become afraid. The littlest boys,
known as “littluns,” have been troubled by nightmares from the beginning, and
more and more boys now believe that there is some sort of beast or monster
lurking on the island. The older boys try to convince the others at the meeting
to think rationally, asking where such a monster could possibly hide during the
daytime. One of the littluns suggests that it hides in the sea, a proposition
that terrifies the entire group.
The conflict between Jack and Ralph and
the forces of savagery and civilization that they represent is aggravated by
the boys' literal fear of a mythical beast roaming the island. One night, an
aerial battle occurs above the island. The boys, asleep below, do not notice
the flashing lights and explosions in the clouds. A casualty of the battle
floats down with his opened parachute, ultimately coming to rest on the
mountaintop. Breezes occasionally inflate the parachute, making the body appear
to sit up and then sink forward again. Sam and Eric, the twins responsible for
watching the fire at night, are asleep and do not see the parachutist land.
When the twins wake up, they see the enormous silhouette of his parachute and
hear the strange flapping noises it makes. This sight panics the boys as they
mistake the dead body for the beast they fear. They think that the island beast
has come closer and they rush back to the camp in terror and report that the
beast has attacked them.
The boys organize a hunting expedition
to search for the monster. Jack and Ralph, who are increasingly at odds, travel
up the mountain. They see the silhouette of the parachute from a distance and
think that it looks like a huge, deformed ape. The group holds a meeting at
which Jack and Ralph tell the others of the sighting. Jack says that Ralph is a
coward and that he should be removed from office, but the other boys refuse to
vote Ralph out of power. Jack angrily runs away down the beach, calling all the
hunters to join him. Ralph rallies the remaining boys to build a new signal
fire, this time on the beach rather than on the mountain. They obey, but before
they have finished the task, most of them have slipped away to join Jack.
In a reaction to this panic, Jack is
joined by all but a few of the boys. Jack has drawn the other boys slowly away
from Ralph's influence because of their natural attraction to and inclination
toward the adventurous hunting activities symbolizing violence and evil. The
boys who join Jack are enticed by the protection Jack's ferocity seems to
provide, as well as by the prospect of playing the role of savages: putting on
camouflaging face paint, hunting, and performing ritualistic tribal dances. Jack
declares himself the leader of the new tribe of hunters and organizes a hunt
and a violent, ritual slaughter of a sow to solemnize the occasion. Eventually,
Jack's group actually slaughters a sow and, as an offering to the beast, puts
the sow's head on a stick.
After witnessing the death of the
sow and the gift made of her head to the beast, the mystic Simon begins to
hallucinate. The voice, which he imagines as belonging to the Lord of the
Flies, says that Simon will never escape him, for he exists within all men.
Simon faints. When he wakes up, he has the courage to discover the true
identity of the beast sighted on the mountain where he sees the dead
parachutist. He understands that the beast is not an animal on the loose but is
hidden in each boy's psyche. He travels to the beach to tell the others what he
has seen. But the others are in the midst of a chaotic revelry—even Ralph and
Piggy have joined Jack’s feast. They see Simon’s shadowy figure emerge from the
jungle. Perceiving him as the beast, the boys beat him to death. They fall upon
him and kill him with their bare hands and teeth.
The following morning, Ralph and
Piggy discuss what they have done. Jack’s hunters attack them and their few
followers and steal Piggy’s glasses in the process. Ralph’s group travels to
Jack’s stronghold in an attempt to make Jack see reason, but Jack orders Sam
and Eric tied up and fights with Ralph. In the ensuing battle, one boy, Roger,
rolls a boulder down the mountain, killing Piggy and shattering the conch
shell. Ralph barely manages to escape a torrent of spears.
Ralph hides for the rest of the
night and the following day, while the others hunt him like an animal. Jack has
the other boys ignite the forest in order to smoke Ralph out of his hiding
place. Ralph stays in the forest, where he discovers and destroys the sow’s
head, but eventually, he is forced out onto the beach, where he knows the other
boys will soon arrive to kill him.
A passing ship sees the smoke from
the fire, and a British naval officer arrives on the beach just in time to save
Ralph from certain death at the hands of the schoolboys turned savages. Ralph
collapses in exhaustion, but when he looks up, he sees the British naval
officer standing over him. The other boys reach the beach and stop in their
tracks at the sight of the officer. Amazed at the spectacle of this group of
bloodthirsty, savage children, the officer asks Ralph to explain. Ralph is
overwhelmed by the knowledge that he is safe but, thinking about what has
happened on the island, he begins to weep. The other boys begin to sob as well.
The officer turns his back so that the boys may regain their composure.
No comments:
Post a Comment