Sir William Gerald Golding

Lord of the Flies

The story

Lord of the Flies opens with a plane full of British schoolboys crashing on a deserted tropical island. With no adults surviving the crash, the boys are left to themselves to try to stay alive. Immediately a sort of informal society springs up with the election of a leader and the setting down of formal objectives and rules. Initially, rescue is foremost on the collective mind, but it is not long before a power struggle ensues with Jack attempting to sway the boys to his camp. Possessing different goals and vastly different sets of ethics, the boys divide into two tribes. Eventually, Ralph’s side of reason and rationality gives way to Jack’s tribe of hunters, and the boys sink deeper and deeper into a life of violent savagery.

Lord of the Files is one of Golding’s most famous books. It is an inverted Victorian boys’ adventure story, whose regular allusions to R.M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island stress Golding’s choice of savage knowledge rather than blithe innocence as the conclusion of his fable.

Marooned on a desert island after a plane crash, a party of schoolboys quickly degenerates into vindictive barbarism. The roguish Jack emerges as a calculating and ruthless dictator, while the fat and clumsy Piggy is taunted, tortured and eventually killed with the Christlike Simon. It is only when the boys are rescued by a British destroyer that Piggy’s well-meaning friend Ralph realizes the true extent of their depravity.

Golding has said that the genesis of his novel lay in the brutalities he witnessed during his service at sea in World War II and in his experience teaching small boys for 13 years. His use of an obvious but effective symbolism throughout the story allows it to work as an allegory of humanity’s fallen nature as well as graphically realistic scenario.

From Lord of the Flies

In the extract below which describes a sinister ritual of Jack’s hunters you may trace how the boys are losing their human qualities and are turning into cruel blood-thirsty beings.

There was a blink of bright light beyond the forest and the thunder exploded again so that a littlun start­ed to whine. Big drops of rain fell among them making individual sounds when they struck.

"Going to be a storm“, said Ralph, ’’and you’ll have rain like when we dropped here. Who’s clever now? Where are your shelters? What are you going to do about that?"

The hunters were looking uneasily at the sky, flinching from the stroke of the drops. A wave of restlessness set the boys swaying and moving aimless­ly. The flickering light became bright­er and the blows of the thunder were only just bearable. The littluns began to run about, screaming.

Jack leapt on to the sand.

"Do our dance! Come on! Dance!"

He ran stumbling-through the thick sand to the open space of rock be­yond the fire. Between the flashes of lightning the air was dark and terrible; and the boys followed him, clamorous­ly. Roger became the pig, grunting and charging at Jack, who side-stepped. The hunters took their spears, the cooks took spits, and the rest clubs of fire-wood. A circling movement devel­oped and a chant.

 

 

While Roger mimed the terror of the pig, the littluns ran and jumped on the outside of the circle. Piggy and Ralph, under the threat of the sky, found themselves eager to take a place in this demented but partly secure society. They were glad to touch the brown backs of the fence that hemmed in the terror and made it governable.

'Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his bipod!¹¹

The movement became regular while the chant lost its first superficial excitement and began to beat like a steady pulse. Roger ceased to be a pig and became a hunter, so that the centre of the ring yawned emptily. Some of the littluns started a ring on their own; and the complementary cir­cles went round and round as though repetition would achieve safety of it­self. There was the throb and stamp of a single organism.

The dark sky was shattered by a blue-white scar. An instant later the noise was on them like the blow of a gigantic whip. The chant rose a tone in agony.

”Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood.

Now out of terror rose another de­sire, thick, urgent, blind.

"Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill the blood.

Again the blue-white scar jagged above them and the sulphurous ex­plosion beat down. The littluns screamed and blundered about, flee­ing from the edge of the forest, and one of them broke the ring of biguns in his terror.

’’Him! Him!“

The circle became a horseshoe. A thing was crawling out of the for­est. It came darkly, uncertainly. The shrill screaming that rose before the beast was like a pain. The beast stumbled into the horseshoe.

”Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill the blood!"

The blue-white scar was con­stant, the noise unendurable. Simon was crying out something about a dead man on a hill.

’’Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! Do him in!"

The sticks fell and the mouth of the new circle crunched and screamed. The beast was on its knees in the centre, its arms folded over its face. It was crying out against the abominable noise something about a body on the hill. The beast struggled forward, broke the ring, and fell over the steep edge of the rock to the sand by the wa­ter. At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore. There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.

 

Then the clouds opened and let down the rain like a water-fall. The water bounded from the mountain- top, tore leaves and branches from the trees, poured like a cold show­er over the struggling heap on the sand. Presently the heap broke up and figures staggered away. Only the beast lay still, a few yards from the sea. Even in the rain they could see how small a beast it was; and already its blood was staining the sand.

 

 

Samuel Beckett

Waiting for Godot