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NOVEL II
LECTURE 18
SYNOPSIS
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Allegory
Character analysis and critical discussion
Allegory
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The Lord of the Flies could be read as one big
allegorical story. An allegory is a story with a
symbolic level of meaning, where the characters
and setting represent, well, other things, like
political systems, religious figures, or philosophical
viewpoints. Let's try a sample:
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The island represents the whole world.
Ralph's conch-led Parliament represents democratic
government.
Jack's tribalism represents autocratic government.
Piggy represents the forces of rationalism, science,
and intellect—which get ignored at society's peril.
Simon represents a kind of natural morality.
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See how it's done? Of course, you could argue with
this breakdown. Maybe Simon represents the
religious side of humanity; maybe Jack represents
cruelty, or maybe Roger does. But the point is that
they're not fully developed and rounded characters
so much as they are symbols.
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The only time we pull out of the allegory is at the
very end of the novel, when the other "real" world
breaks through the imaginary barrier around the
island. Yet this is also the moment when the real
question of the allegory hits home: who will rescue
the grownups?
Body Paint
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There's a reason (some) women put on more
makeup when they're going on a job interview or a
first date—and those neat-looking black stripes
under football players' eyes are more effective at
looking awesome than guarding against the sun.
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Jack (duh) is the first one to pretty himself up, and
he does it because he figures out that his pig-prey
keeps spotting him: "They see me, I think," he says:
"Something pink, under the trees" (4.2). And so he
gets the bright idea to paint his face, "dazzle paint.
Like things trying to look like something else" (4.24).
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But the paint turns out to be more than camouflage.
It doesn't just make Jack look like something else
(say, part of the forest); it actually makes him into
something else. It makes him into a savage—and
then the chief. When his face is finished, "the mask
was a thing of its own, behind which Jack hid,
liberated from shame and self-consciousness" (4.34).
With the paint on his face, Jack isn't choir-leader
Jack anymore; he's a savage ready to be chief.
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And Jack isn't the only one who has an inner
savage. Eventually almost all the boys paint their
faces, too. Ralph and his tiny band of still-civilized
boys know that it's just paint, but that doesn't
change its power. When they plan to go take
Piggy's glasses back from Jack, Eric hesitates: "But
they'll be painted! You know how it is." And
everyone does: "They understand only too well the
liberation into savagery that the concealing paint
brought" (11.66).
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So there you have it. Golding isn't being tricky with
this symbol; paint "liberates" the boys into
savagery, freeing them to act in a way that schools,
parents, and policemen have never let them. In
other words, the paint represents the savage within.
It doesn't disguise the boys' true nature; it reveals it.
Wounds
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From the moment the boys land on the island, we
begin to see signs of destruction. Over and over we
are told of the "scar" that the plane leaves in the
greenery (1.3). The water they bathe in is "warmer
than blood" (1). The boys leave "gashes" in the
trees when they travel (1). The lightning is a "bluewhite scar" and the thunder "the blow of a gigantic
whip," later a "sulphurous explosion" (9).
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If you're trying to answer the big question of
whether the boys are violent by nature or are made
violent by their unfortunate situation, you could
argue that (1) because the island/nature is already
so violent (think the thunder and lightning), the boys
couldn't help but become part of its savagery when
they arrived; or that (2) the boys are bringers of
destruction, ruining the island paradise.
Us? We'd like to go with option 1, but we're pretty
sure Golding wants us to pick option 2.
Characters…
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Ralph
Character Analysis
Ralph is like the school president, football
quarterback, and prom king all rolled into one, 12year-old package. He's the first lost boy we meet,
and he's definitely the best—after all, he's elected
chief.
But what makes him chief-worthy?
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Golden Boy
Mostly, his all-American—we mean, all-British—
good looks. He's "fair" (1.1) and "attractive." More
than that, he has the conch. And he can blow it.
Because the conch symbolizes power and order (see
"Symbols" for more about that), Ralph gets a head
start in the island power structure.
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But he also knows what that power's for. Instead of
getting caught up in the hunting bloodlust, he
proposes something practical, sensible, and—we'll
say it—British: start a fire, and then watch it to
make sure it doesn't go out. He's got nerve, too.
When someone has to go look for the "beast,"
Ralph appoints himself. When he's scared, he
"[binds] himself together with his will" (7.246),
meaning that he's able to force himself to do
something he really, really doesn't want to do for
the good of the group.
Maybe He's Born With It
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So, here's our question: is Ralph innately a good leader,
or is he only a good leader as long as everyone agrees
to live by "civilized" rules? Unfortunately for Ralph, it
looks like his power depends on civilization. Check out
how he approaches his office: "He lifted the conch.
'Seems to me we ought to have a chief to decide things'
(1.228). A chief, to Ralph, is a sort of first-amongequals deal, someone who's elected to keep things in
order. As he thinks, "if you [are] a chief, you [have] to
think, you [have] to be wise […] you [have] to grab at a
decision" (5.10).
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See that word "decide" used twice? For Ralph, chiefdom
is about leading people. It's not about personal power
or triumph; it's about making sure the group is taken
care of, which means making sure the little ones get
looked after, keeping people from pooping where they
eat (literally), and getting that darn fire lit.
But is Ralph innately good? Maybe. He doesn't throw
rocks at any little boys; he doesn't paint his face all
crazy, and he insists that "this is a good island" (2). At
the same time, our little golden boy isn't exactly
innocent.
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Decline and Fall
One of Ralph's first actions is taking off his clothes.
Believe us when we say that stripping is never a
good sign: it's the first step to becoming a lawless
savage. Here's how it goes down:
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He [Ralph] jumped down from the terrace. The sand
was thick over his black shoes and the heat hit him. He
became conscious of the weight of clothes, kicked his
shoes off fiercely and ripped off each stocking with
its elastic garter in a single movement. Then he leapt
back on the terrace, pulled off his shirt, and stood
there among the skull-like coconuts with green
shadows from the palms and forest sliding over his
skin. He undid the snake-clasp of his belt, lugged off
his shorts and pants, and stood there naked, looking
at the dazzling beach and the water. (1.53)
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Sure, this is probably a more sensible way to run
around a deserted island than in black shoes and
garters. But it's also a sign that, underneath his
school uniform, Ralph is just as much a little savage
as any of the other boys. We get a hint of this even
earlier, when he "shriek[s] with laughter" about
Piggy's name (1): Ralph may be a good kid, but
he's still a kid.
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And when it comes to hunting, Ralph starts to seem
even more sinister. The first time he wounds a pig,
he talks "excitedly" and thinks that maybe "hunting
was good after all" (7). And then, when the party
at Jack's starts to heat up, they find themselves
"eager to take a place in this demented but partly
secure society" (9)—which pretty soon turns into the
brutal murder of Simon. No matter how much Ralph
tries to convince himself that "we left early" (10), it's
not true: he helped kill Simon. The beast lives in him,
too.
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Come to think of it, that just might be what saves
him. At the end, he's all animal: he "launched himself
like a cat; stabbed, snarling, with the spear, and the
savage doubled up" (12.165), keeping himself
alive long enough to roll away from Jack's band
and end up at the feet of the naval officer—safe.
For now.
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Ch-ch-ch-changes
We don't know what Ralph is going to be like now
that he's back home, but we get the feeling he might
be different. All that British order that he relied on?
Now he knows that it's nothing more than a thin
coating of civilization. Give him a sharpened stick
and a pig carcass, and he's going to be ripping at
the flesh with everyone else.
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His first big philosophical moment comes during a late
afternoon assembly, when the light makes everything
look different. To Ralph, that means they are different:
"If faces [are] different when lit from above or below—
what is a face? What is anything?" (5.9)
To translate: the island makes people lose their
meaning. When the boys paint themselves and act like
"savages," he decides they're completely different
beings than the British boys who came to the island. To
Ralph, this break in logic is a way of coping, a way of
dealing with the horrors of his circumstances. But is he
right?
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Check out the way he gradually deteriorates over
the course of the novel. As order and rules go by
the wayside, so does the order within Ralph's own
head. He can remember that he wants a signal fire,
but he can't remember why. He knows it's something
to do with smoke, but then he can't put two and two
together. Piggy has to help him out repeatedly, and
the gap in Ralph's train of thoughts worsens as the
novel progresses. When they confront Jack and the
"savages," Piggy has to remind him: "remember
what we came for. The fire. My specs" (11.159).
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Ralph remembers—but barely. And that just might
make Ralph our tragic figure. Sure, Piggy and
Simon both die. But Ralph is the one who has to go
back to civilization with the knowledge that,
underneath his schoolboy uniform, he's nothing more
than a lawless, orderless savage.
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Ralph
Another perspective…
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Ralph is the athletic, charismatic protagonist of
Lord of the Flies. Elected the leader of the boys at
the beginning of the novel, Ralph is the primary
representative of order, civilization, and productive
leadership in the novel. While most of the other
boys initially are concerned with playing, having
fun, and avoiding work, Ralph sets about building
huts and thinking of ways to maximize their
chances of being rescued. For this reason, Ralph’s
power and influence over the other boys are
secure at the beginning of the novel.
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However, as the group gradually succumbs to savage
instincts over the course of the novel, Ralph’s position
declines precipitously while Jack’s rises. Eventually,
most of the boys except Piggy leave Ralph’s group for
Jack’s, and Ralph is left alone to be hunted by Jack’s
tribe. Ralph’s commitment to civilization and morality
is strong, and his main wish is to be rescued and
returned to the society of adults. In a sense, this
strength gives Ralph a moral victory at the end of the
novel, when he casts the Lord of the Flies to the ground
and takes up the stake it is impaled on to defend
himself against Jack’s hunters.
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In the earlier parts of the novel, Ralph is unable to
understand why the other boys would give in to base
instincts of bloodlust and barbarism. The sight of the
hunters chanting and dancing is baffling and distasteful
to him. As the novel progresses, however, Ralph, like
Simon, comes to understand that savagery exists
within all the boys. Ralph remains determined not to
let this savagery -overwhelm him, and only briefly
does he consider joining Jack’s tribe in order to save
himself. When Ralph hunts a boar for the first time,
however, he experiences the exhilaration and thrill of
bloodlust and violence.
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When he attends Jack’s feast, he is swept away by the
frenzy, dances on the edge of the group, and
participates in the killing of Simon. This firsthand
knowledge of the evil that exists within him, as within
all human beings, is tragic for Ralph, and it plunges
him into listless despair for a time. But this knowledge
also enables him to cast down the Lord of the Flies at
the end of the novel. Ralph’s story ends semitragically: although he is rescued and returned to
civilization, when he sees the naval officer, he weeps
with the burden of his new knowledge about the human
capacity for evil.
Jack
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Jack
Character Analysis
For Jack, the island is like the best summer vacation ever. He
gets to swear, play war games, hunt things, and paint his
face—all without any grownups around to send him to his
room for accidentally killing the neighbors.
Like Ralph, Jack is charismatic and inclined to leadership.
Unlike Ralph, he gets off on power and abuses his position
above others—so, he's basically an '80s, without good hair
and daddy's credit card. Let's see how he transforms from
arrogant choir boy into painted savage.
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Not-So-Golden Boy
Jack is ugly. Well, according the narrator he is: he's "tall,
thin, and bony: and his hair was red beneath the black cap.
His face was crumpled and freckled, and ugly without
silliness. Out of this face stared two light blue eyes,
frustrated now, and turning, or ready to turn, to anger" (1).
We've just met him, and we're already getting a bad
feeling. Where Ralph is described as "fair" and "attractive,"
Jack is freckled and redheaded. (Duh, everyone knows
redheads are evil.) And check out those angry eyes. It's no
surprise that Jack can't wait to pick up a spear.
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Ralph is elected leader because he's cute and seems
pretty mature, and he's our protagonist for pretty
much the same reasons. But Jack doesn't get it. He
thinks that he deserves to be chief because he's
"chapter chorister and head boy. [He] can sing C
sharp" (1.228-30)—in other words, for no good
reason at all. He should be leader because he's
always been leader in the past, even though that
leadership was based on something completely
unrelated to his ability to govern: a nice singing
voice.
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The problem with this kind of social structure is that
it's not based on anything real. At first, Jack seems
ready to help Ralph establish order: "We've got to
have rules and obey them. After all, we're not
savages. We're English, and the English are best at
everything" (2.192). That doesn't exactly sound like
a kid who's five seconds away from slaughtering a
wild pig and painting himself with its blood, right?
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But saying "we have to have rules because we're
English and awesome" is, when you think about it,
identical to saying "I should be leader because I
can sing C sharp." It's meaningless. It's jingoistic. And
it disguises the fact that Jack is actually a pretty
scary dude. As soon as there's no civilization to
keep him in line, he—unlike Ralph—falls out of line.
Majorly.
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Power Corrupts
Jack's litany of evil is pretty impressive. He leads
the brutal slaughter of a pig—and then Simon. He
fosters rebellion. He has his minions beat a kid
named Wilfred for some unspecified misdeed. He
throws a spear at Ralph with "full intention" (11),
trying to kill him, and then sends the minions after
him to finish the job.
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But he couldn't do any of this without power. And somehow, he gets
it. When he leaves Ralph's group, he convinces the others to come
with him by promising a hunt. The pre-teen boys aren't interested in
Ralph's boy-scout team-building and fire-watching. They want blood.
And once Jack gets control, he turns from a choir boy into a, well,
this:
A great log had been dragged into the center of the lawn and Jack,
painted and garlanded, sat there like an idol…
Power lay in the brown swell of his forearms: authority sat on his
shoulder and chattered in his ear like an ape.
"All sit down."
The boys ranged themselves in rows on the grass before him but Ralph
and Piggy stayed a foot lower, standing on the soft sand. Jack ignored
them for the moment, turned his mask down to the seated boys and
pointed at them with his spear. (9.37, 52-56)
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Jack is an "idol" with an "ape" sitting on his shoulder;
he's no longer a little boy. He's a "chief," and not only
the boys but the narrator actually calls him "the chief":
"the chief was sitting there, naked to the waist, his face
blocked out in white and red" (10). Jack? There is no
Jack by this point. "Jack" is a just a name covering up
the ugly, primitive core beneath the British choir boy
exterior. When Jack picks up a spear and then walks
out on Ralph's pitiful attempt to impose order, he's not a
boy anymore: he's a savage.
(And if you're thinking that this all sounds a little
racist—we think you're right.
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Kid Stuff
By the end of the book, Jack has become a subhuman terror,
inspiring panic in Ralph and awe in the rest of the boys. Or has he?
Throughout the whole story, we get little hints that this might be
nothing more than a game gone wrong. When Jack leaves Ralph's
group, check how he does it:
His voice trailed off. The hands that held the conch shook. He cleared
his throat, and spoke loudly.
"All right then."
He laid the conch with great care in the grass at his feet. The
humiliating tears were running from the corner of each eye.
"I'm not going to play any longer. Not with you." (8.67-75)
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Does this sound like a savage psychopath in the making, or does it
sound like a little boy who's mad that things aren't fair? What's cool
about this moment is that Golding mostly keeps us in the boys'
viewpoint, and particularly Ralph's. When they're scared, we're
scared; when they're having a fun pig-killing orgy, we're having a
fun pig-killing orgy. But occasionally he drop in moments like this,
where we see the boys in a new way—as kids playing a game gone
horribly wrong.
At the end, we see things from the naval officer's perspective. He
asks who's in charge (assuming very Britishly that someone is), and
Ralph steps up. Keep in mind that being in charge also means taking
some sort of responsibility for, oh, the two gruesome murders.
Maybe that's why Jack ends up hanging back:
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A little boy who wore the remains of an
extraordinary black cap on his red hair and who
carried the remains of a pair of spectacles at his
waist, started forward, then changed his mind and
stood still. (12)
To the boys, Jack is a powerful, savage chief. To the
officer (and to us), he's just a "little boy" wearing
goofy clothes. Golding leaves us with a question:
what is Jack, really? Is he a heartless savage, or is
he just a little British boy playing a game?
Jack
Another perspective…
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The strong-willed, egomaniacal Jack is the novel’s
primary representative of the instinct of savagery,
violence, and the desire for power—in short, the
antithesis of Ralph. From the beginning of the novel,
Jack desires power above all other things. He is furious
when he loses the election to Ralph and continually
pushes the boundaries of his subordinate role in the
group. Early on, Jack retains the sense of moral
propriety and behavior that society instilled in him—in
fact, in school, he was the leader of the choirboys. The
first time he encounters a pig, he is unable to kill it.
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But Jack soon becomes obsessed with hunting and
devotes himself to the task, painting his face like a
barbarian and giving himself over to bloodlust. The
more savage Jack becomes, the more he is able to
control the rest of the group. Indeed, apart from Ralph,
Simon, and Piggy, the group largely follows Jack in
casting off moral restraint and embracing violence and
savagery. Jack’s love of authority and violence are
intimately connected, as both enable him to feel
powerful and exalted. By the end of the novel, Jack has
learned to use the boys’ fear of the beast to control their
behavior—a reminder of how religion and superstition
can be manipulated as instruments of power.
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Simon
Character Analysis
The first time we see Simon, he's fainting, and things
go downhill from there. From passing out to
throwing up to hallucinating to getting bloody noses,
Simon is a walking mess. But he's anything but weak.
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Power in All the Wrong Places
Simon may be a little timid, but he's a compassionate
guy. A "skinny, vivid boy" (1.267), Simon's innate
goodness comes out in his actions. He recovers Piggy's
glasses when they fly off his face (post-Jack's punch),
he gives Piggy his own share of meat, and he helps the
littluns pick fruit: "found for them the fruit they could not
reach, pulled off the choicest from up in the foliage,
passed them back down to the endless, outstretched
hands (3.138). And, of course, he doesn't turn into a
primitive savage and go around killing things.
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He's also wise, mature, and insightful to the point of
being prophetic. He's the only one (except Piggy)
who understands the beast:
Simon, walking in front of Ralph, felt a flicker of
incredulity—a beast with claws that scratched, that
sat on a mountain-top, that left no tracks and yet was
not fast enough to catch Samneric. However Simon
thought of the beast, there rose before his inward
sight the picture of a human, at once heroic and sick.
(6.140)
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Simon, from his little leafy meditation cave, gets it:
the island is changing them. Being afraid of the
beast turns them into beasts. If you're having trouble
understanding this, let's literalize it for you: he's
basically saying that being afraid of an enemy
makes you do such horrific things that you turn into
the enemy yourself. And by "you," we mean
"nations" and "governments." Sound familiar? It
should. It's the same kind of argument that some
people make today about the War on Terror.
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Pig on a Stick
But Simon's freaky wisdom doesn't mean he's immune to
the island's effects. Hallucinating and probably
dehydrated (that "swollen tongue" is a good giveaway
[8.327]), he imagines—we think—the severed pig's
head talking to him. And that means Simon is even wiser
than we thought, because all of the head's lines are
actually his own, like this:
"Fancy thinking the beast was something you could hunt
or kill! … You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? Close,
close, close. I'm the reason why it's no go? Why things
are what they are?" (8.337)
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Simon is the only boy to truly grasp that "the beast" is
just all the negative, horrible aspects of mankind. And
his "I'm the reason why it's no go" is a direct answer to
the question Piggy posed several pages earlier: "What
makes things break up the way they do?" (8.265).
Simon does have all the answers—but no one's listening.
Of course, there's also the remote possibility that the
talking pig's head isn't a mere hallucination—it's the
actual Lord of the Flies, evil incarnate, talking to Simon
via a severed noggin. If this is true, Simon loses points
for not coming up with the intelligent insights on his own.
On the other hand, he gains quite a few points back for
being like Jesus.
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Christ Figure
Yep, we've got a Christ-figure on our hands. To start
with, his name is Simon, which happens to be the name
of one of the twelve apostles. Simon started out as
Simon until Jesus decided really his name should be
"Peter" instead, because "peter" means rock—and
Simon was the "rock" on which Jesus would build his
church. If you glance at our "Nutshell," you'll notice that
Lord of the Flies is a response to an earlier and much
more cheerful boys-on-a-desert-island book, The Coral
Island. Golding even borrowed the names Ralph, Jack,
and Peterkin. Except "Peterkin" ended up as "Simon."
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And then there's Simon's affinity for meditation, his
kindred spirit-ness with animals, his attitude (think
about the fruit-picking), and his ability to
prophesize, like when he tells Ralph that Ralph will
get home, and sort of suggests that he himself won't.
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Having established that, we can go back to our pig'shead-on-a stick scene and compare it to Jesus's visit to
the Garden of Gethsemene the night before he was
crucified. And when we say "visit," what we really mean
is long and solitary mental suffering, much like Simon
undergoes the night before he meets his own untimely
death. Simon, like Jesus, is "thirsty," and later "very
thirsty," and although the text doesn't say it, we can
only assume that at one point later he is very, very
thirsty. He's also sweating, having a seizure, and
bleeding profusely from his nose.
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So, if Simon's "night before" matches up with Jesus's
"night before," then does Simon die for the sins of the
boys? Are they somehow saved by his death? It's hard
to say. But it does seem meaningful that he alone had
the knowledge of the beast's true nature, he alone had
the potential to save the boys from themselves and their
fear, and they basically kill him for trying to spread the
good news.
The tragic part (well, the especially tragic part) is that
Simon says the beast is "only us" and then gets pegged
as the beast himself—even though he's the least beastlike of any of the boys. The question is whether, like
Jesus, being non-beasty makes him more or less human.
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Simon
Another perspective…
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Whereas Ralph and Jack stand at opposite ends of
the spectrum between civilization and savagery,
Simon stands on an entirely different plane from all
the other boys. Simon embodies a kind of innate,
spiritual human goodness that is deeply connected
with nature and, in its own way, as primal as Jack’s
evil. The other boys abandon moral behavior as
soon as civilization is no longer there to impose it
upon them. They are not innately moral; rather,
the adult world—the threat of punishment for
misdeeds—has conditioned them to act morally.
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To an extent, even the seemingly civilized Ralph
and Piggy are products of social conditioning, as
we see when they participate in the hunt-dance. In
Golding’s view, the human impulse toward
civilization is not as deeply rooted as the human
impulse toward savagery. Unlike all the other boys
on the island, Simon acts morally not out of guilt or
shame but because he believes in the inherent
value of morality.
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He behaves kindly toward the younger children, and he is
the first to realize the problem posed by the beast and the
Lord of the Flies—that is, that the monster on the island is
not a real, physical beast but rather a savagery that lurks
within each human being. The sow’s head on the stake
symbolizes this idea, as we see in Simon’s vision of the
head speaking to him. Ultimately, this idea of the inherent
evil within each human being stands as the moral
conclusion and central problem of the novel. Against this
idea of evil, Simon represents a contrary idea of essential
human goodness. However, his brutal murder at the hands
of the other boys indicates the scarcity of that good amid an
overwhelming abundance of evil.
REVIEW 18
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Allegory
Character analysis and critical discussion