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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• Chapter 4

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

• Chapter 5

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

• Chapter 8

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

• Chapter 9

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