Lord of the Flies

Summary

Lord of the Flies follows a party of British schoolboys, aged roughly six to twelve, whose aeroplane is shot down over a tropical island during an unnamed atomic war. No adult survives. Ralph, fair and athletic, finds a conch shell in a lagoon, and Piggy, a fat, asthmatic, short-sighted boy who becomes his companion, shows him how to blow it. The sound gathers the scattered children, among them Jack Merridew, who marches up at the head of his black-cloaked choir. The boys elect Ralph chief, and the conch becomes the sign of order: whoever holds it may speak at assembly. Jack takes the choir as hunters. Using Piggy's spectacles as a burning glass, the boys light a signal fire on the mountain, but it escapes and burns part of the forest, and a littlun with a mulberry-coloured birthmark is never seen again. Ralph struggles to get huts built and the fire kept going while Jack grows obsessed with killing a pig. When the hunters let the fire die on the day a ship passes, then return chanting with their first kill, the rift between the two boys opens. Fear spreads among the small children of a beast in the dark. At a night assembly the quiet, solitary Simon suggests that the beast may be the boys themselves, and he is laughed down. A dead airman whose parachute drifts down onto the mountain is taken for the beast by the twins Sam and Eric. Jack, failing to unseat Ralph by vote, leaves to found his own tribe of painted hunters, who kill a sow and set her head on a sharpened stick as an offering. Alone in a forest glade, Simon faces the fly-covered head, which seems to speak to him as the Lord of the Flies; he then climbs the mountain, finds the rotting parachutist, and frees the lines. Coming down to tell the others, he stumbles into the hunters' frenzied dance during a thunderstorm and is beaten to death, Ralph and Piggy among the dancers on the edge. Jack's tribe raids the shelters and steals Piggy's glasses. When Ralph, Piggy and the twins go to Castle Rock to demand them back, Roger levers a boulder down that kills Piggy and shatters the conch. The twins are forced to join the tribe, and Jack's hunters set the island ablaze to drive Ralph out. Running in terror onto the beach, Ralph falls at the feet of a naval officer whose cruiser has seen the smoke. The officer, embarrassed by the painted boys, expected better of British children, and Ralph weeps. Faber and Faber published the novel in London in September 1954 after a run of rejections, with the editor Charles Monteith guiding cuts to the manuscript.

Plot or Argument

• Chapters 1-2: The Sound of the Shell; Fire on the Mountain

  Ralph and Piggy find the conch and call the survivors together. Ralph is elected chief, Jack takes charge of the hunters, and the boys light a signal fire with Piggy's glasses that runs out of control; a small boy with a birthmark disappears in the blaze.

• Chapters 3-4: Huts on the Beach; Painted Faces and Long Hair

  Ralph and Simon build shelters while Jack hunts. Jack paints his face with clay and charcoal, and his hunters let the fire go out just as a ship passes; they return with their first pig, and Jack strikes Piggy, breaking one lens.

• Chapter 5: Beast from Water

  Ralph calls a night assembly to restore rules. The littluns' fears of a beast dominate it; Simon proposes that the beast is in the boys, and the meeting dissolves as Jack and the hunters break away.

• Chapters 6-7: Beast from Air; Shadows and Tall Trees

  A dead parachutist lands on the mountain and Sam and Eric take him for the beast. The older boys explore the island and Castle Rock; during a mock hunt Robert is nearly hurt, and Ralph, Jack and Roger see the shape on the mountaintop and flee.

• Chapter 8: Gift for the Darkness

  Jack fails to depose Ralph and leaves to form his own tribe. The hunters kill a sow and leave her head on a stick for the beast; Simon, alone, sees the head and hears it speak as the Lord of the Flies.

• Chapter 9: A View to a Death

  Simon finds the dead parachutist and goes down to tell the others, but at Jack's feast the storm-driven dance turns on him and he is killed. The tide carries his body out to sea.

• Chapters 10-11: The Shell and the Glasses; Castle Rock

  Ralph and Piggy struggle with what they took part in. Jack's hunters steal Piggy's glasses; at Castle Rock, Roger sends down the boulder that kills Piggy and smashes the conch, and the twins are captured.

• Chapter 12: Cry of the Hunters

  Hunted across a burning island, Ralph runs onto the beach and meets a naval officer. Rescue comes, and Ralph weeps for what he has learned.

Characters

• Ralph, protagonist; elected chief

  Fair-haired boy of about twelve who holds to the signal fire, the shelters and the rule of the conch.

• Piggy, Ralph's adviser

  Fat, asthmatic, short-sighted boy whose spectacles make fire and whose reasoning is mocked.

• Jack Merridew, head chorister; leader of the hunters

  Proud choir leader who turns hunter, paints his face and sets up his own tribe at Castle Rock.

• Simon, solitary visionary

  Shy boy subject to fainting fits who helps the littluns, faces the pig's head and discovers the truth about the beast.

• Roger, Jack's lieutenant

  Secretive older boy whose cruelty grows until he kills Piggy.

• Sam and Eric (Samneric), twins

  Inseparable boys who tend the fire, report the beast and are forced into Jack's tribe.

• Maurice, hunter

  Choir boy who joins the hunters and plays the pig in their mock hunts.

• Percival Wemys Madison, littlun

  Small boy who recites his name and address as a comfort and later forgets it.

• The naval officer, rescuer

  Unnamed officer whose arrival ends the hunt and frames the boys' war inside the adults' war.

Lessons

• The beast within

  Golding said the book was an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The boys look everywhere for a beast outside themselves, in the sea, the air and the jungle, while Simon alone sees that the evil they fear is in their own hearts. The island has no adults to blame, so the novel strips away every excuse.

  • Why do the other boys laugh at Simon when he says the beast might be themselves?
  • What does the pig's head on the stick tell Simon in Chapter 8, and why does he faint afterwards?
  • Is the novel's view of human nature too dark, or does it match what you know of yourself?

• Order is fragile and must be kept

  The conch, the assemblies, the shelters and the signal fire are small, dull duties, and Ralph's authority depends on the boys choosing to keep them. Jack offers meat, paint and excitement instead. The book shows how quickly rules collapse when they cease to be loved, and that the boring tasks are often the ones that save lives.

  • Why does Jack's offer of hunting and feasting win over most of the boys?
  • What does the shattering of the conch with Piggy's death mean for the island?
  • Which rules in your own community depend on people keeping them when no one is watching?

• Fear and the crowd

  Fear of the beast grows at every assembly until it can be used to rule. Jack turns the hunt into a ritual chant and dance, and in Chapter 9 the crowd kills Simon without anyone deciding to do it. Golding shows how individuals lose responsibility inside a frightened group.

  • How does Jack use the beast to strengthen his hold over the hunters?
  • Were Ralph and Piggy guilty for joining the dance at the edge? How do they each speak about it in Chapter 10?

• Reason without courage is not enough

  Piggy is usually right about the fire, the shelters and the need for rules, but he cannot make the others listen, and Ralph often lets him be mocked. The novel honours Piggy's sense and shows that truth needs friends who will defend it.

  • Why does Ralph reveal Piggy's nickname to the others in Chapter 1, and does he ever make up for it?
  • What does Ralph lose when Piggy dies?

Context

Golding wrote the novel in the years after the Second World War, in which he had served at sea, and at the start of the atomic age. The story imagines the evacuation of children during a nuclear war, and the boys' war on the island is framed by the adults' war overhead: the dead parachutist and the naval cruiser both belong to it. Golding answered the optimism of R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857), in which shipwrecked British boys named Ralph, Jack and Peterkin behave nobly; his naval officer even mentions that book at the end.

Composition

Golding wrote the book while teaching at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury, under the working title Strangers from Within. It was turned down by a long series of publishers before Charles Monteith at Faber and Faber took it up and worked with Golding on cuts, including an opening section about the evacuation and passages making Simon more explicitly a visionary. Faber published it on 17 September 1954; an American edition followed in 1955.

Reception

Sales were modest at first, but the novel became a campus favourite in the United States around 1960 and then a standard school text in Britain and America. Peter Brook filmed it in 1963, and a second film appeared in 1990. Golding's later novels and the Nobel Prize of 1983 confirmed his reputation, and the book remains his best-known work.

Comparisons

• robinson-crusoe

  Defoe's castaway builds order, faith and industry alone on his island; Golding's boys, with many hands and a whole community, unravel. The two islands test the same human nature to opposite conclusions.

• leviathan

  Hobbes's state of nature, a war of all against all where life is nasty, brutish and short, is close to what the island becomes once the conch loses its authority; Ralph's assemblies are a small attempt at the covenant Hobbes describes.

• confessions

  Augustine's theft of the pears in Book II, done for the pleasure of wrongdoing in company, is a classic Christian account of the sinfulness of children and of evil done together, which Golding dramatizes on a larger scale.

• animal-farm

  Both postwar English fables show a new community's rules eroded by a leader who rules by fear; Orwell's target is a political revolution, Golding's is human nature itself.

• the-bacchae-and-other-plays

  In Euripides' Bacchae a frenzied, worshipping band tears Pentheus apart; Simon's death in the hunters' storm-dance echoes that ancient picture of religious ecstasy turned to killing.

• heart-of-darkness

  Conrad's Kurtz and Golding's Jack both find, far from the restraints of home, the darkness of the human heart; Golding's closing line about man's heart answers Conrad's title.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The conch: who holds it, who ignores it, and how its power fades from Ralph's first assembly in Chapter 1 to the boulder at Castle Rock in Chapter 11.
• Piggy's spectacles, which light the first fire, lose one lens when Jack strikes him in Chapter 4, and are stolen in Chapter 10. Notice what the island loses when the glasses go.
• Jack's painted face in Chapter 4 and how the mask frees him from shame; later the whole tribe hides behind paint.
• Every account of the beast, from the littlun's snake-thing in Chapter 2 to the dead parachutist on the mountain, and Simon's very different answer in Chapter 5.
• The last two pages: how the naval officer sees the boys, and what his own warship says about the grown-up world.

Key terms and names

The conch

The pink-and-cream shell Ralph and Piggy find in the lagoon. Blown, it calls assemblies; held, it gives the right to speak, and it becomes the sign of lawful order on the island.

Littluns and biguns

The boys' own names for the youngest children, around six, and the older ones. The littluns' fears of the beast are first dismissed and then exploited by the biguns.

The beast

The creature the boys believe lurks in the jungle, the sea or the air. Its true nature is the central question of the book, answered physically by the dead airman and spiritually by Simon.

Lord of the Flies

The sow's head on a stick, swarming with flies, which seems to talk to Simon in Chapter 8. The title translates the Hebrew name Beelzebub, a name for a demon in the Gospels.

Castle Rock

The rocky fortress at the end of the island where Jack sets up his tribe. It is where Piggy is killed and where the conch is shattered.

Samneric

The boys' run-together name for the twins Sam and Eric, who act and speak as one. Their capture shows Ralph's last allies being absorbed into the tribe.

Signal fire

The fire on the mountain, and later on the beach, that might bring rescue. Keeping it alive is Ralph's chief duty, and the final rescue comes, ironically, from Jack's fire to smoke Ralph out.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension How is Ralph chosen as chief in Chapter 1, and what does he give Jack to keep him content?
2. Comprehension What happens to the signal fire on the day the ship passes in Chapter 4, and how does Ralph respond?
3. Comprehension What does Simon find on the mountain in Chapter 9, and what happens when he comes down to tell the others?
4. Interpretation Why is Jack able to draw the boys away from Ralph? Consider meat, paint, the beast and the excitement of the hunt.
5. Interpretation Simon's conversation with the pig's head in Chapter 8 is the strangest scene in the book. What does the head claim to be, and why does Golding make Simon, rather than Piggy, the one who learns the truth?
6. Interpretation In Chapter 10 Piggy insists Simon's death was an accident, while Ralph calls it murder. Which of them is more honest, and why do they need to disagree?
7. Interpretation At the end the naval officer thinks of the boys as a game gone wrong. What does his ship, and the war it serves, add to the meaning of the story?
8. Big Question Is evil something we learn from society, or something we bring into the world with us? Use the island, where there are no adults, to argue your answer.

Faith Connections

• Jeremiah 17:9 (Scripture)

  The prophet calls the heart deceitful above all things and desperately sick, and asks who can understand it. Golding's closing words about the darkness of man's heart restate that verse for a century of world wars.

• Matthew 12:24-28 (Scripture)

  The Pharisees accuse Jesus of casting out demons by Beelzebul, the prince of demons. The novel's title comes from that name, often rendered lord of the flies, and the pig's head that speaks to Simon plays a demonic role.

• Romans 3:10-18 (Scripture)

  Paul gathers verses from the Psalms to say that none is righteous and that the way of peace is unknown to fallen people. The boys' descent from assembly to murder is a story of that condition without any word of the remedy.

• Augustine, Confessions I.7 and II.4-9 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine observes jealousy even in a nursing infant and recalls stealing pears as a boy only because his friends were with him. He saw children as small sinners and companionship as an accelerant of wrongdoing, the same insights Golding builds the island around.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: If the defects of society come from the defects of human nature, then children removed from adult society will not stay innocent but will reproduce its violence. The island removes every adult, law and excuse; the boys still divide into rival powers, invent a god of fear, and kill. Therefore the source of evil is within the human heart, and the rules and rescues of civilization restrain it without curing it, as the warship at the end shows.

Rhetorical device: tricolon. The final sentence of Chapter 12 (quote 1) builds through three objects of Ralph's grief: the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall of Piggy, moving from the abstract to the personal.

Debate: Resolved: Ralph bears some of the guilt for the deaths of Simon and Piggy.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Golding gives each boy a part of the human person: Ralph's leadership, Piggy's reason, Simon's spiritual insight, Jack's appetite for power. Argue which one the novel finally treats as the most important, using the deaths of Simon and Piggy as your evidence.

Comparison with Robinson Crusoe: Crusoe alone on his island turns to Scripture, work and order; Golding's boys together turn to paint and the hunt. Compare the two islands and argue what each author believes a person left outside society will become, and why.

Medical Lens

The novel is not about medicine, but it is a frequent reference in discussions of group psychology, mob violence and the loss of individual restraint in crowds, and it offers several bodily details worth noting. Piggy's asthma (which he pronounces ass-mar) and myopia mark him as physically weak in a society that prizes the hunt, and his spectacles, which make fire, are the island's only technology. Simon's fainting fits, first seen when he collapses on the march of the choir and again after his encounter with the pig's head, have sometimes been read as epilepsy, but Golding never names a diagnosis and the episodes also carry a visionary meaning; present any medical reading as interpretation. The littluns suffer chronic diarrhoea from a diet of fruit, cry and talk in their sleep, and suffer nightmares about the beast. The chanting, painted dance in the storm of Chapter 9 is a literary picture of collective frenzy, an altered state of a group rather than a person. The deaths of the birthmarked littlun, Simon and Piggy are given without medical detail.

• Chapter 1

  Piggy explains his asthma and need for glasses; Simon faints during the choir's march across the hot sand.

  Disability Deformity Epilepsy Seizures
• Chapter 4

  The littluns live on fruit and suffer from stomach-aches and chronic diarrhoea.

  Starvation Nutrition
• Chapter 5

  At the night assembly the littluns' nightmares and fears of the beast are aired.

  Dreams Nightmares
• Chapter 8

  Simon's waking vision before the pig's head ends in a faint.

  Epilepsy Seizures Altered States
• Chapter 9

  The ritual dance in the thunderstorm becomes a group frenzy in which Simon is killed.

  Altered States Death Dying

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Trace the conch from its discovery in Chapter 1 to its destruction in Chapter 11 and argue what Golding means by it.

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation Ralph and the naval officer might have on the cruiser that evening, in which Ralph tries to explain what happened to Simon and Piggy.

• Classroom

  Hold a mock assembly with a conch: students argue, in role as Ralph, Jack, Piggy and Simon, whether the boys should hunt or keep the fire, and then discuss what happened to the rules of speaking.

• Fiction

  Retell one scene from the point of view of Samneric, who are on Ralph's side but end up captive in Jack's tribe.

Further Reading

• The Coral Island, R. M. Ballantyne

  The 1857 boys' adventure that Golding set out to answer.

• The Inheritors, William Golding

• The Hot Gates, William Golding

  Essays, including Golding's account of writing the novel, Fable.

• William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies, John Carey