squeaked." What a prize!
Wounded, she flees, "bleeding and mad"; "the hunters followed, wedded to her
in lust, excited by the long chase and the dropped blood." The sow finally
falters and in a ghastly scene Jack and Roger ecstatically consummate their
desires:
Here, struck down by the heat, the sow fell and the hunters hurled
themselves at her. This dreadful eruption from an unknown world made her
frantic; she squealed and bucked and the air was full of sweat and noise and
blood and terror. Roger ran round the heap, prodding with his spear whenever
pigflesh appeared. Jack was on top of the sow, stabbing downward with his
knife. Roger found a lodgment for his point and began to push till he was
leaning with his whole weight. The spear moved forward inch by inch and the
terrified squealing became a high-pitched scream. Then Jack found the throat
and the hot blood spouted over his hands. The sow collapsed under them and
they were heavy and fulfilled upon her. The butterflies still danced,
preoccupied in the center of the clearing.
The fifth hunt, moving us even closer to the unbridled impulses of the
human heart, is a fine amalgam of the third and fourth. This time Simon is
at the center of the hideous circle, yet the pursuit is no more make-believe
than it was with the heavy-teated sow. Simon is murdered not only without
compunction but with orgiastic delight.
The final and climactic abhorrence is the hunt for Ralph. Its terror
will not be celebrated here; suffice it to say that one refinement not
present in the Simon episode is added -a stick Roger sharpens at both ends.
It had indeed been used for the sow, with one point piercing the earth and
the other supporting the severed head, but its human use had not yet been
tested on that island paradise.
Such being Mr. Golding's art and conviction, it is little wonder that
some readers have judged him offensive, revolting, depravedly sensational,
utterly wicked. He has been impelled to say that many human beings, left
unrestrainedly to their own devices, will find the most natural expression
of their desires to lie in human head-hunting. Those who affirm that man is
made in God's image will be given some pause, but upon reflection they will
probably interpret the novel as a portrayal of the inevitable and ultimate
condition of a world without grace. Those who affirm that man is basically
and inherently good-and becoming better-may simply find the novel a
monstrous perpetuation of falsehood.
Golding's main offense, I suppose, is that he profanes what many men
hold most precious: belief that the human being is essentially good and the
child essentially innocent. Yet his offense, as well as his genius, lies not
in any originality of view or statement but in his startling ability to make
his story real, so real that many readers can only draw back in terror. I
would strongly affirm, however, that Golding's intention is not simply to
leave us in a negative state of horror. Lard of the Flies has a tough moral
and religious flavor,2 one which a study of its title helps make
clear.
The term "lord of the flies" is a translation of the Hebrew word
"Baalzebub" or "Beelzebub." The Baal were the local nature gods of the early
Semitic peoples. In II Kings 1:2 Baalzebub is named as the god of Ekron. All
three Synoptic Gospels refer to Beelzebub; in Luke 11:15 he is called "the
chief of the devils." In English literature among those who refer to him are
Christopher Marlowe and Robert Burton, though it is left to Milton to
delineate his character at some length. Weltering by Satan's side he is
described as "One next himself [Satan] in power, and next in crime, /Long
after known in Palestine, and nam'd Beelzebub." His subtle services to the
great Adversary of mankind are well known. To disregard the historical
background of Golding's title3 or the place of the Lord of the
Flies within the novel is to miss a good part of the author's intent; it is,
indeed, to leave us with nothing but horror.
2.Thomas M. Coskren, O. P., in "Is Golding Calvinistic?" America, 109
(July 6, 1963), 18-20, also speaks to this point at length. The essay is
reprinted on pp. 253-260 in this volume.- Eds.
3. Golding seems to attach no particular significance to the historical
Beelzebub but to regard him as simply another manifestation or creation of
the human heart. (See James Keating and William Golding, "The Purdue
Interview," p. 192 in this volume.) It is difficult to see how the
"historical background" for the title enhances understanding of Golding's
basic fable, although it certainly figures as a due to the theme.-Eds.
At the conclusion of the fourth hunt, after the boys have hacked the
multiparous sow, they place its head on a stick as a sacrificial offering
for some reputedly mysterious and awesome beast-actually a dead parachutist
who had plummeted to the ground, now unrecognizable as his body rises and
falls each time the wind fills the parachute and then withdraws from it.
Meanwhile Simon, whose love for his companions and desire to protect them
instill a courage extraordinary, leaves them to search out the darksome
creature. He finds himself confronted by the primitive offering, by "the
head grinning amusedly in the strange daylight, ignoring lie flies, the
spilled guts, even ignoring the indignity of being spiked on a stick." As he
is impelled to stare at the gruesome object, it undergoes a black, unholy
transfiguration; he sees no longer just a pig's head on a stick; his gaze,
we are told, is "held by that ancient, inescapable recognition." And that
which is inescapably recognized by Simon is of primordial root. Its
shrewdness and devastation have long been chronicled: it is on center stage
in the third chapter of Genesis; it gained the rapt attention of Hosea and
Amos and the prophets who followed them.
As Simon and the Lord of the Flies continue to face each other, the
nature of the latter is clearly and explicitly set forth in an imaginary
conversation which turns into a dramatic monologue. The head speaks:
"What are you doing out here all alone? Aren't you afraid of me?" Simon
shook.
"There isn't anyone to help you. Only me. And I'm the Beast." Simon's
mouth labored, brought forth audible words. "Pig's head on a stick."
"Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill" said
the head. . . . "You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? Close, dose, close!
I'm the reason why it's no go? Why things are what they are?"
A moment later, the Beast goes on:
"I'm warning you, I'm going to get angry. D'you see? You're not wanted.
Understand? We are going to have
fun on this island. Understand? We are going to have fun on this
island! So don't try it on, my poor misguided boy, or else-"
Simon found he was looking into a vast mouth. There was blackness
within, a blackness that spread.
"-Or else," said the Lord of the Flies, "we shall do you. See? Jack and
Roger and Maurice and Robert and Bill and Piggy and Ralph. Do you. See?"
Simon was inside the mouth. He fell down and lost consciousness.
The "ancient, inescapable recognition" is that the Lord of the Flies is
a part of Simon, of all the boys on the island, of every man. And he is the
reason "things are what they are." He is the demonic essence whose
inordinate hunger, never assuaged, seeks to devour all men, to bend them to
his will. He is, in Golding's novel, accurately identified only by Simon.
And history has made clear, as the Lord of the Flies affirms, that the
Simons are not wanted, that they do spoil what is quaintly called the "fun"
of the world, and that antagonists will "do" them.
Simon does not heed the "or else" imperative, for he bears too
important a message: that the beast is "harmless and horrible." The direct
reference here is to the dead parachutist whose spectrally moving form had
terrified the boys; the corpse is, obviously, both harmless and horrible.
But it should also be remembered that the Lord of the Flies identified
itself as the Beast and that it too might be termed "harmless and horrible."
Simon alone has the key to its potential harmlessness. It will become
harmless only when it becomes universally recognized, recognized not as a
principle of fun but as the demonic impulse which is utterly destructive.
Simon staggers on to his companions to bear the immediate good news that the
beast (the rotting parachutist) is harmless. Yet he carries with him a
deeper revelation; namely, that the Beast (the Lord of the Flies) is no
overwhelming extrinsic force, but a potentially fatal inner itching,
recognition of which is a first step toward its annihilation. Simon becomes,
of course, the suffering victim of the boys on the island and, by extension,
of the readers of the book.4
4.Compare Donald R. Spangler, "Simon" on pp. 211-215 in this
volume.-Eds.
IV
To me Lord of the Flies is a profoundly true book. Its happy offense
lies in its masterful, dramatic and powerful narration of the human
condition, with which a peruser of the daily newspaper should already be
familiar. The ultimate purpose of the novel is not to leave its readers in a
state of paralytic horror. The intention is certainly to impress upon them
man's, any man's, miraculous ingenuity in perpetrating evil; but it is also
to impress upon them the gift of a saving recognition which, to Golding, is
apparently the only saving recognition. An orthodox phrase for this
recognition is the "conviction of sin," an expression which grates on many
contemporary ears, and yet one which the author seemingly does not hold in
derision.
Lecturing at Johns Hopkins University in the spring of 1962, Golding
said that Lord of the Flies is a study of sin. And he is a person who uses
words with precision. Sin is not to be confused with crime, which is a
transgression of human law; it is instead a transgression of divine law. Nor
does Golding believe that the Jacks and Rogers are going to be reconstructed
through social legislation eventuating in some form of utopianism-he and
Conrad's Mr. Kurtz are at one in their evaluation of societal laws which,
they agree, exercise external restraint but have at best a slight effect on
the human heart. Golding is explicit: "The theme [of Lord of the Flies]" he
writes, "is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects
of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the
ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however
apparently logical or respectable,"
William Golding's story is as old as the written word. The figure of
the Lord of the Flies, of Beelzebub, is one of the primary archetypes of the
Western world. The novel is the parable of fallen man. But it does not close
the door on that man; it entreats him to know himself and his Adversary, for
he cannot do combat against an unrecognized force, especially when it lies
within him.
Is Golding Calvinistic?1
A more optimistic interpretation of the
symbolism found in Lord of the Flies
THOMAS MARCELLUS COSKREN, O. P.
IN an issue of America last winter, two critics gave their
interpretations of William Golding's remarkably successful Lord of the
Flies.2 While the approach of each of these critics differed, Mr.
Kearns being concerned with the sociopolitical implications of the work and
Fr. Egan with the theological, both reached the same conclusion: Lord of the
Flies presents the Calvinist view of man as a creature essentially depraved.
As one of the professors who has placed the novel on his required reading
list, I should like to raise a dissenting voice.
While I am prepared to admit that Lord of the Flies is hardly the most
optimistic book that has appeared in recent times, I find it difficult to
accept the conclusion reached by Fr. Egan and Mr. Kearns. Both, it seems to
me, have left too much of the novel unexplained; indeed, their view of the
work seems to render important sections inexplicable. If Golding has
presented man as essentially depraved, why are three of his four major
characters good people? Granted that Ralph, Piggy and Simon possess a
limited goodness, the condition of all men, they are decidedly boys of high
1.This article is reprinted with permission from America, the National
Catholic Weekly Review, 920 Broadway, New York City. It appeared in the
issue of July 6, 1963, Volume 109, pp. 18-20.
2.Francis E. Kearns, "Salinger and Golding: Conflict on the Campus,"
America, 108 (January 26, 1963), 136-39, and John M. Egan, "Golding's View
of Man," 140-41.-Eds.
purpose, who use good means to achieve their ends. Jack may strike many
as the perfect symbol of essentially depraved man, but he is only one out of
four. Three-to-one seems a rather impressive ratio favoring at least a
limited goodness in the human community.
Moreover, if Golding hesitates "to view evil in a religious framework,"
as Mr. Kearns says, why is Simon, on the symbolic level, so cleverly
identified with Christ? 3 In fact, this identification is so
obvious that one is tempted to agree with Kearns' statement about Lord of
the Flies being "too neatly symbolic, too patently artistic." Certainly, the
very presence of a Christ-figure in the novel, a presence which pervades the
work, implies some kind of religious framework.
Again, if man were not good or innocent at some time in the long
history of the race, why should Ralph at the end of the novel weep "for the
end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air
of the true, wise friend called Piggy"? Ralph weeps for an innocence that
man once possessed; he laments the loss of goodness, and this is not some
vague goodness, but the palpable goodness in his "true, wise friend."
Thus far, the objections I have offered to the view presented by Mr.
Kearns and Fr. Egan concern only the characters in Lord of the Flies. These
objections are serious enough, but there are others which demand examination
by the critic. If the world into which these characters have been placed is,
as Fr. Egan states, a universe that is "a cruel and irrational chaos," why
does Golding indicate, with almost obsessive attention to detail, the
pattern, the order of the island world which the boys inhabit? Throughout
the novel we find natural descriptions which use metaphors from the world of
manufacturing.
In other words, the universe of Lord of the Flies is one that has been
made, created. The novel is filled with phrases like the following: "a great
platform of pink granite"; "a criss-cross pattern of trunks"; "the palms . .
. made a green roof "; "the incredible lamps of stars." Further, Golding's
adjectives indicate an ordered universe. This indication is especially
apparent after the terrible storm accompanying Simon's death. In this
section he uses such words as "angu-
2.Cf. Donald R. Spangler's "Simon" on pp. 211-215 in this volume. See
also Golding's remarks on Simon in the interview with James Keating, p.
192.-Eds.
lar" and "steadfast" to describe the constellations. If William
Golding's universe is "a cruel and irrational chaos," he has certainly
chosen most inappropriate words to describe it.
Basically, it seems to me, the real difficulty with the interpretation
of Lord of the Flies offered by Fr. Egan and Mr. Kearns is its failure to
treat the novel as a whole. William Golding's novel is not antihuman; it is
anti-Rousseau. It does not portray human nature as such; it presents human
nature as infected with the romantic chimera of inevitable human progress, a
progress which will be achieved because of the innate nobility and innocence
of the human species. In theological terms, which are perhaps the most
accurate critical tools for explaining this novel, Lord of the Flies is not
so much Manichean as it is anti-Pelagian. A more detailed analysis should
help to show this anti-Pelagian character of the work.
Lord of the Flies begins with all the paraphernalia of the romantic,
and sentimental, preconceptions that owe so much to Rousseau's social
philosophy. In the first chapter we are presented with a group of children,
the contemporary world's symbol of innocence. They are placed on a tropical
island, an earthly paradise, Rousseau's habitat for the "noble savage." But
these boys are not Adam-figures; they are not innocent. Each of them, in
varying degrees, reflects the influence of the serpent-which, by the way, is
introduced in the first chapter when Ralph unfastens "the snake-clasp of his
belt." Here begins the terrible irony that runs through the whole novel.
Romantic man thinks he can rid himself of evil merely by taking off his
clothes, the symbol of civilization and its effects.
In this superficially idyllic community, made up of refugees from an
atomic war, we discover Golding's four major characters: Ralph, Piggy, Jack
and Simon. It is with these characters that Golding's symbolism becomes
somewhat more complex than either Mr. Keams or Fr. Egan suggests. Lord of
the Flies is essentially a fable about contemporary man and contemporary
ideas. Thus, Ralph is not only the symbol of the decent, sensible
parliamentarian; he is also me figure of an idea: the abstract concept of
democratic government. The same double role is filled by the other
characters: Jack is at once the dictator and the concept of dictatorship;
Piggy is the intellectual, with all his powers and deficiencies, and
representative of the Enlightenment or scientific method. Finally, Simon is
the mystic and poet, who is also a Christ-figure and thus the symbol of
religious faith. The symbolism of Lord of the Flies, therefore, functions on
a number of levels, and it seems to be an injustice to Golding's
extraordinary dexterity in handling these multiple levels to reduce them to
one level, that of universal human nature.
Golding suggests the complexity of these symbolic figures in their
physical descriptions. Ralph is "the boy with fair hair [who has] a mildness
about his mouth and eyes that proclaimed no devil." On the literal level we
have the good boy, the "solid citizen." As such, Ralph engages our
sympathies. And on the most obvious symbolic level he still has our
sympathies, for he represents the decent, sensible parliamentarian, the
political ideal of the Western world.
But on another, and deeper, level Golding has introduced an ironic
twist. The symbolic value Ralph possesses as the abstract concept of the
democratic process is presented as a challenge to the reader. If, as the
Western world seems to believe, the democratic process of government is the
best devised by man throughout his history, why doesn't it work always and
everywhere? It is at this level that Golding suggests symbolically the
inadequacy, not the depravity, of the solely human; it is at this level that
he directs his devastatingly ironic commentary on the Rousseauvian myth of
the general will and its unproved presupposition of the natural goodness of
the human species.
In effect, Golding's modern fable puts Rousseau's social contract to
the test: Lord of the Flies takes man back to the primitive condition of
things, which the French social reformer had advocated as the one sure way
of restoring man to his proper dignity. Then it shows that, far from being
naturally good, man has some type of defect for which civilization is not
responsible. Rousseau's social philosophy fails the test, and the
essentially confused notion of nature which Rousseau bequeathed to the
contemporary world is exposed for the fraud that it is.
Moreover, the irony implicit in Ralph's inadequacy is extended to the
other characters, either as they participate in the same inadequacy or as
they question symbolically the solution offered for human ills by Ralph's
faith in Rousseauvian democracy. Piggy participates in the "grand design" of
restoration. As a figure of the Enlightenment, he cannot accept the extremes
of romanticism, and he votes for Ralph only "grudgingly"; but he will use
the more popular romantic concept of government and will try to direct ft.
Yet, even with his discerning rational assessment of the problem of forming
a government for the refugees, his inherent weaknesses are evident
Ultimately, he is destroyed, not because his intellectual gifts are
depraved, but because he falls into the mistaken belief that they are
sufficient unto themselves. Piggy is intelligent enough, for example, to
question Ralph's blind faith in rescue by the military (a scathing
commentary on the Western democracies' current worship at the shrine of Cape
Canaveral), but he remains blind to the limitations of his own reason.
Jack and Simon, on the other hand, are not taken in by the Rousseauvian
solution. Jack's approach to the human condition is much too twisted for
even the remotest comparison with the idealism, fanciful though it is,
implicit in Rousseau; Simon's view of humanity is so penetrated with
realistic self-appraisal that he transcends the idealism of the French
reformer. Jack descends to the subhuman; Simon soars to the superhuman.
While Ralph and Piggy exemplify ironically the "noble savage," Jack and
Simon provide the necessary counterpoint; Jack exploits the savagery, and
Simon explores the nobility.
And it is probably through the figure of Jack that William Golding
pronounces his severest condemnation of the romantic myth of human progress.
For, in the last analysis, it is the dictator who has benefited most from
Rousseau's social view. When man's efforts toward progress and eventual
fulfillment, however altruistic his motivation, proceed from sloppy
thinking, then brute force takes over to direct the course of progress and
subverts even the good in human nature to its own destructive ends.
Yet, Golding is not interested merely in the altruism or the
subversion; between these two forces in contemporary civilization he places
the figure of Simon. He introduces him to the reader in somewhat
melodramatic fashion: the boy faints. In this, the first of Simon's actions,
we have a possible ironic twist on Swinburne's famous line: "Thou hast
conquer'd, O pale Galilean; the world has grown gray from thy breath." It is
obvious from Simon's subsequent history that he is a Christ-figure; and the
romantic view of
humanity proposed by Rousseau has so infiltrated every aspect of life
in the contemporary world that even Christ is seen through the rose-colored
glasses of sentimentality, which is the logical and real successor to
romanticism.
Thus, the Christ of Lord of the Flies is the "pale Galilean"; yet it is
this same weak Christ who, in the first act he performs, forces a concession
from Jack, and the choir boys are allowed to rest The irony is evident: even
a weak Christ is more than a strong dictator.4 Further, when
Simon announces his name (and his name has the strongest biblical
overtones), Jack says: "We've got to decide about being rescued."
Immediately, Simon is linked, however vaguely, with the idea of salvation.
After the boys have elected Ralph as leader by "this toy of voting,"
Jack, Simon and Ralph begin exploring the mountain. This section of the
novel is crucial, for it is here that Golding gives his abbreviated ironical
summary of the romantic view of human progress. The passage needs analysis
in depth (impossible in an article of this length), but it should be pointed
out that Golding has chosen as explorers those who have dominated the
history of man: the totalitarian, the parliamentarian and the mystic-poet
And, as is clear from the text, Simon is the realist of the triumvirate.
When the boys examine the bushes on the mountain, Simon accepts them for
what they are. Ralph and Jack are concerned only with how the buds can be
used That Golding's figure of religious faith accepts reality as it is
provides an interesting comment on the limited approaches of the
parliamentarian and the dictator.
As we follow Simon through the novel, we discover that he is the mystic
who separates himself from the others to ponder the mysteries of existence.
Simon is the carpenter who continues building the shelters after the other
boys have abandoned the work; Simon feeds the "littluns"; Simon encounters
the beast in all its loathsomeness and does not succumb to the beast's
temptation to despair. This encounter is the boy's Gethsemane: he comes face
to face with evil, recognizes it for what it is, and, despite the agony and
horror of the meeting, he is neither defeated
4.Simon's martyrdom, however, indicates that the saint or Christ-like
personage (in spite of his spiritual strength) fails to rescue man from the
nightmare of history.-Eds.
nor intimidated by it. Immediately after he recovers consciousness, he
ascends the mountain to free the dead pilot, whose parachute lines have
become entangled in the rocks. In other words, Simon climbs the mountain to
free "fallen man."
He returns then to the boys to announce the good news; they need no
longer fear the beast. But the group will not listen to him. Like the One in
whose place he stands symbolically, Simon is murdered during a religious
festival- the diabolical liturgy of the pig. His death occurs while the
island world cowers under the lash of a gigantic storm. And it is only after
Simon has actually died that the dead man in the parachute is finally freed
and washed out to sea, the sea which is Golding's symbol of mystery, not
chaos.
Finally, Simon has his symbolic hour of glorification: his body is
surrounded by "moonbeam-bodied creatures with fiery eyes"; gleaming in this
unearthly phosphorescence, he is carried gently out to sea. And it is
difficult not to recognize the hint of a resurrection motif here, for the
pattern is that of the hero carried through the waters to his apotheosis.
Lord of the Flies, as I have suggested, is not an optimistic novel, but
at least it is pessimistic about the right things. It states quite clearly
that the time has come for the Western world to abandon its fantastic belief
in the Rousseauvian concept of the natural goodness of the human species,
which goodness must lead inevitably to the total perfection of the race. It
shows what happens to scientific man, when he trusts only in the activity of
his unaided reason. It castigates the Western democracies for their blind
acceptance of salvation through militarism. It pictures the tragic
destruction of any society which nourishes and exalts the dictator.
Ultimately, it presents the awesome spectacle of a world which, not
satisfied with murdering Simon, continues to neglect the significance of his
sacrifice.
But William Golding's world is not merely pessimistic. There is
goodness in his characters; there is order in his universe.5
However, like all authors who have tried their
5.It might well be noted, however, that the goodness and the order are
overcome in every instance. True, Ralph survives and he steps forward to
announce himself to the rescuer" as the leader, but the rescue is decidedly
ironic; the boys are freed from primitive and childish militarism only by
sophisticated adult militarism.-Eds.
hand at the intellectual exercise we call fable, he wants to teach man
some hard truths about his own .nature. In the complexity and ambiguity of a
highly elaborated symbolism, he has reminded modern man of the fact of
original sin. This is a reminder that we all need every so often. In a later
novel, The Inheritors, Golding places the following ironic words in the
mouth of one character: "People understand each other." Lord of the Flies
answers: "Perhaps; but not well enough."
"Men of a Smaller Growth":
A Psychological Analysis
of William Golding's
Lord of the Flies1
CLAIRE ROSENFIELD
When an author consciously dramatizes Freudian theory- and dramatizes
it successfully-only the imaginative recreation of human behavior rather
than the structure of ideas is apparent. In analyzing William Golding's Lord
of the Flies, the critic should assume that Golding knows psychological
literature,2 and must then attempt to show now an author's
knowledge of theory can vitalize his prose and characterization. The plot
itself is uncomplicated; so simple, indeed, that one wonders how it so
effortlessly absorbs the burden of meaning. During some unexplained man-made
holocaust a plane, evacuating a group of children, crashes on the shore of a
tropical island. All adults are conveniently killed. The narrative follows
the children's gradual return to the amorality of childhood, a non-innocence
which makes them small savages. Or we might make the analogy to the
childhood of races and compare the child
1.This essay appeared in Literature and Psychology, 11 (Autumn, 1961),
93-101, and is reprinted in a revised version here by permission of the
author and the editor, Leonard F. Manheim.
2.Note Golding's comment that he has read "absolutely no Freud" in
"Lord of the Campus," Time, LXXIX (June 22, 1962), 64. Reprinted in this
volume, p. 285.-Eds.
to the primitive. Denied the sustaining and repressing authority of
parents, church, and state, the boys form a new culture, the development of
which reflects that of the genuine primitive society, evolving its gods and
demons, its rituals and taboos, its whole social structure. On the level of
pure narrative, the action proceeds from the gradual struggle between Ralph
and Jack, the two oldest boys, for precedence. Consistent clusters of
imagery imply that one boy is godlike, the other satanic-thus making a
symbolic level of meaning by transforming narrative events into an
allegorical struggle between the forces of Good and those of Evil. Ralph is
the natural leader by virtue of his superior height, his superior strength,
his superior beauty. His mild expression proclaims him "no devil." He
possesses the symbol of authority, the conch, or sea shell, which the
children use to assemble their miniature councils. Golding writes, "The
being that had blown . . . [the conch] had sat waiting for them on the
platform with the delicate thing balanced on his knees, was set apart."
Jack, on the other hand. is described in completely antithetical terms; he
is distinguished by his ugliness and his red hair, a traditional demonic
attribute. He first appears as the leader of a church choir, which
"creature-like" marches in two columns behind him. All members of the choir
wear black; "their bodies, from throat to ankle, were hidden by black
cloaks." 3 Ralph initially blows the conch to discover how many
children have escaped death in the plane crash. As Jack approaches with his
choir from the "darkness of the forest," he cannot see Ralph, whose back is
to the sun. The former is, symbolically, sun-blinded. These two are very
obviously intended to recall God and the Devil, whose confrontation, in the
history of Western religions, establishes the moral basis for all actions.
But, as Freud reminds us, "metaphysics" becomes
"metapsychology";4 gods and devils are "nothing other than
processes projected into the outer world." 5 If Ralph is a
projection of man's good impulses from which we derive the authority
figures-whether god, king, or father
3.P. 16. All page references are to this edition of Lord of the Flies
and will hereafter be noted in parentheses in the text.
4.Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, as quoted by
Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books,
1957), III, 53.
5. Ibid.
-who establish the necessity for our valid ethical and social action,
then Jack becomes an externalization of the evil instinctual forces of the
unconscious; the allegorical has become the psychological.
The temptation is to regard the island on which the children are
marooned as a kind of Eden, uncorrupted and Eve-less. But the actions of the
children negate any romantic assumptions about childhood innocence. Even
though Golding himself momentarily becomes a victim of his Western culture
and states at the end that Ralph wept for the "end of innocence," events
have simply supported Freud's conclusion that no child is innocent. On a
fourth level, Ralph is every man-or every child-and his body becomes the
battleground where reason and instinct struggle, each to assert itself. For
to regard Ralph and Jack as Good and Evil, as I do in the previous
paragraph, is to ignore the role of the child Piggy, who in the child's
world of make-believe is the outsider. Piggy's composite description not
only manifests his difference from the other boys; it also reminds the
reader of the stereotype image of the old man who has more-than-human
wisdom: he is fat, inactive because asthmatic, and generally reveals a
disinclination for physical labor. Because he is extremely near-sighted, he
wears thick glasses- a further mark of his difference. As time passes, the
hair of the other boys grows with abandon. "He was the only boy on the
island whose hair never seemed to grow. The rest were shock-headed, but
Piggy's hair still lay in wisps over his head as though baldness were his
natural state, and this imperfect covering would soon go, like the velvet on
a young stag's antlers" (59). In these images of age and authority we have a
figure reminiscent of the children's past - the father. Moreover, like the
father he counsels common sense; he alone leavens with a reasonable gravity
the constant exuberance of the others for play or for play at hunting. When
they scamper off at every vague whim, he scornfully comments, " Like a pack
of kids. " Ungrammatically but logically he tries to allay the "littluns''
fear of a "beast" "Life is scientific, that's what it is. ... I know there
isn't no beast-not with claws and all that, I mean-but I know there isn't no
fear, either'" (77). He has excessive regard for the forms of order: the
conch must be held by a child before that child can speak at councils. When
the others neglect responsibility, fail to build shelters, swim in the pools
or play in the sand or hunt, allow the signal fire on the mountain to go out
or get out of hand and burn up half the island, he seconds Ralph by
admonishing the others vigorously and becomes more and more of a spoilsport
who robs play of its illusions, like the adult who interrupts the game.
Ralph alone recognizes Piggy's superior intelligence, but wavers between
what he knows to be wise and the group acceptance his egocentricity demands.
Finally, Piggy's role-as man's reasoning faculties and as a father-derives
some of its complexity from the fact that the fire which the children foster
and guard on the mountain in the hope of communicating with the adult world
is lighted with his glasses. In classical mythology, after all, fire brought
civilization-and, hence, repression-to man. As the hold of civilization
weakens, the new community becomes more and more irrational, and its
irrationality is marked by Piggy's progressive blindness. An accident
following an argument between Ralph and Jack causes one of the lenses of
Piggy's glasses to break. When the final breach between the two occurs and
Piggy supports Ralph, his remaining lens is stolen in a night raid by Jack.
This is a parody of the traditional fire theft, which was to provide light
and warmth for mankind. After this event Piggy must be led by Ralph, When he
is making his final plea for his glasses-reasoned as always-he is struck on
the head by a rock and fails. "Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back
on that square, red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff came out and
turned red. Piggy's arms and legs twitched a bit, like a pig's after it has
been killed" (167). What Golding emphasizes here is the complete animality
to which Piggy is reduced, His mind is destroyed; his body is subject to
motor responses alone; he is "like a pig after it has been killed."
The history of the child Piggy on the island dramatizes in terms of the
individual the history of the entire group. When they first assemble to
investigate their plight, they treat their island isolation as a temporary
phenomenon. They are, after all, still children, wanting only to play games
until they are interrupted by the action of parents, until the decisions of
their elders take them from make-believe to the actuality of school or food
or sleep; until they are rescued, as it were, from "play." This microcosm of
the great world seems to them to be a fairy land.
A kind of glamour was spread over them and the scene and they were
conscious of the glamour and made happy by it (22).
The coral was scribbled in the sea as though a giant had bent down to
reproduce the shape of the island in a flowing, chalk line but tired before
he had finished (25).
"This is real exploring," said Jack. "I'll bet nobody's been here
before" (23).
Echoes and birds flew, white and pink dust floated, the forest further
down shook as with the passage of an enraged monster: and then the island
was still (24).
They compare this reality which as yet they do not accept as reality to
their reading experiences: it is Treasure Island or Coral Island or like
pictures from their travel books. This initial reaction reaffirms the
pattern of play which Johan Huizinga establishes in Homo Ludens6
In its early stages their play has no cultural or moral function; it is
simply a "stepping out of real life into a temporary sphere of activity."
7 Ironically, the child of Lord of the Flies who thinks he is
"only pretending" or that this is "only for fun" does not realize that his
play is the beginning of the formation of a new society which has regressed
to a primitive state, with all its emphasis upon taboo and communal action.
What begins by being like other games in having a distinct "locality and
duration" 8 apart from ordinary life is-or becomes-reality. The
spatial separation necessary for the make-believe of the game is represented
first by the island. In this new world the playground is further narrowed:
not only are their actions limited by the island, but also the gatherings of
the children are described as a circle at several points, a circle from
which Piggy is excluded:
For the moment the boys were a closed circuit of sympathy with Piggy
outside (18).
They became a circle or boys round a camp fire and even Ralph and Piggy
were half-drawn in (67).
Piggy approximates the spoilsport who "robs the play of its illusion,"
9 who reminds them of space and time outside the charmed circle,
who demands responsibility.
6.Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).
7.Ibid.,p.8.
8.Ibid.,p.9.
9.Ibid.,p.7.
The games of the beginning of the novel have a double function: they,
first of all, reflect the child's attitude toward play as a temporary
cessation from the activities imposed by the adult world; but, like the
games played before the formation of civilization, they anticipate the
ritual which reveals a developing society. So the children move from
voluntary play to ritual, from "only pretending" to reality, from
representation or dramatization to identification. The older strictures
imposed by parents are soon forgotten-but every now and then a momentary
remembrance of past prohibitions causes restraint. One older child hides in
order to throw stones at a younger one.
Yet there was a space around Henry, perhaps six yards in diameter, into
which he dare not throw. Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the
old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school
and policemen and the law (57).
Jack hesitates when, searching for meat, he raises his knife to kill
his first pig.
The pause was only long enough for them to understand what an enormity
the downward stroke would be. Then the piglet tore loose from the creepers
and scurried into the undergrowth. . . .
"Why didn't you-?"
They knew very well why he hadn't: because of the enormity of the knife
descending and cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood
(27).
The younger children first, then gradually the older ones, like
primitives in the childhood of races, begin to people the darkness of night
and forest with spirits and demons which had previously appeared only in
their dreams or fairy tales. Now there are no comforting mothers to dispel
the terrors of the unknown. They externalize these fears into the figure of
a "beast." Once the word "beast" is mentioned, the menace of the irrational
becomes overt; name and thing become one. Simply to mention the dreaded
creature is to incur its wrath. At one critical council when the first
communal feeling begins to disintegrate, Ralph cries, "If only they could
send us something grown-up ... a sign or something" (87). And a sign does
come from the outside. That night, unknown to the children, a plane is shot
down and its pilot parachutes dead to earth and is caught in the rocks on
the mountain. It requires no more than the darkness of night together with
the shadows of the forest vibrating in the signal fire to distort the
tangled corpse with its expanding silk parachute into a demon that must be
appeased. Ironically, the fire of communication does touch this object of
the grown-up world, only to foster superstition. But the assurances of the
civilized world provided by the nourishing and protective parents are no
longer available. Security in this new situation can only be achieved by
establishing new rules, new rituals to reassert the cohesive-ness of the
group.
During the first days the children, led by Jack, play at hunting. But
eventually the circle of the playground extends to the circle of the hunted
and squealing pig seeking refuge which itself anticipates the circle of
consecrated ground where the children perform the new rites of the kill.
The first hunt accomplishes its purpose: the blood of the animals is
spilled; the meat used for food. But because Jack and his choir undertake
this hunt, they desert the signal fire, the case of which is dictated by the
common-sense desire for rescue; it goes out and a ship passes the island.
Later the children re-enact the killing with one boy, Maurice, assuming the
role of the pig running its frenzied circle. The others chant in unison:
"Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Bash her in." At this dramatic representation
each child is still aware that this is a display, a performance. He is never
"so beside himself that he loses consciousness of ordinary
reality."10 Each time they re-enact the same event, however,
their behavior becomes more frenzied, more cruel, less like dramatization or
imitation than identification. The chant then becomes, "Kill the beast. Cut
his throat. Spill his blood." It is as if the first event, the pig's actual
death, is forgotten in the recesses of time; it is as if it happened so long
ago that the children have lost track of their history on the island; facts
are distorted, a new myth defines the primal act. Real pig becomes mythical
beast to children for whom the forms of play have become the rituals of a
social order.
Jack's ascendancy over the group begins when the children's fears
distort the natural objects around them: twigs
20 Ibid., p. 14.
become creepers, shadows become demons. I have already discussed the
visual imagery suggesting jack's demonic function. He serves as a physical
manifestation of irrational forces. After an indefinite passage of time, he
appears almost dehumanized, his "nose only a few inches from the humid
earth." He is "dog-like" and proceeds forward "on all fours" into the
"semi-darkness of the undergrowth." His cloak and clothing have been shed.
Indeed, except for a "pair of tattered shorts held up by his knife-belt, he
was naked." His eyes seemed "bolting and nearly mad." He has lost his
ability to communicate with Ralph as he had on the first day. "He tried to
convey the compulsion to track down and kill that was swallowing him up"
(46). "They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling, unable
to communicate" (49). When Jack first explains to Ralph the necessity to
disguise himself from the pigs he wants to hunt, he rubs his face with clay
and charcoal. At this point he assumes a mask, begins to dance, is finally
freed from all the repressions of his past. "He capered toward Bill, and the
mask was a thing on its own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and
self-consciousness" (58). At the moment of the dance the mask and Jack are
one. The first kill, as I have noted, follows the desertion of the signal
fire and the conterminous passage of a possible rescue ship. Jack, however,
is still revelling in the knowledge that they have "outwitted a living
thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long and
satisfying drink" (64). Note that the pig is here described as a "living
thing" not as an animal; only if there is equality between victor and victim
can there be significance in the triumph of one over the other. Already he
has begun to obliterate the distinction between animals and men, as do
primitives; already he thinks in terms of the metaphor of a ritual drinking
of blood, the efficacy of which depended on the drinker's assumption of his
victim's strength and spirit. Ralph and Piggy confront him with his
defection of duty, his failure to behave like a responsible member of
Western society.
The two boys faced each other. There was the brilliant world of
hunting, tactics, fierce exhilaration, skill; and there was the world of
longing and baffled commonsense. Jack transferred the knife to his left hand
and smudged blood over his forehead as he pushed down the plastered hair
(65).
Jack's unconscious gesture is a parody of the ritual of initiation in
which the hunter's face is smeared with the blood of his first kill. In the
subsequent struggle one of the lenses of Piggy's spectacles is broken. The
dominance of reason is over; the voice of the old world is stilled. The
primary images are no longer those of fire and light but those of darkness
and blood. The initial link between Ralph and Jack "had snapped and fastened
elsewhere."
The rest of the group, however, shifts its allegiance to Jack because
he has given them meat rather than something as useless as fire. Gradually,
they begin to be described as "shadows" or "masks" or "savages" or "demoniac
figures" and, like Jack, "hunt naked save for paint and a belt." Ralph now
uses Jack's name with the recognition that "a taboo was evolving around that
word too." Name and thing again become one; to use the word is to incite the
bearer, who is not here a transcendent or supernatural creature but rather a
small boy. But more significant, the taboo, according to Freud, is "a very
primitive prohibition imposed from without (by an authority) and directed
against the strongest desires of man." 11 In this new society it
replaces the authority of the parents, whom the children symbolically kill
when they slay the nursing sow. Now every kill becomes a sexual act, is a
metaphor for childhood sexuality, an assertion of freedom from mores they
had been taught to revere.
The afternoon wore on, hazy and dreadful with damp heat; the sow
staggered her way ahead of them, bleeding and mad, and the hunters followed,
wedded to her in lust, excited by the long chase and the dropped blood. . .
. The sow collapsed under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon her
(125).
Every subsequent ritual fulfills not only a desire for communication
and for a security to substitute for that of civilization, but also a need
to liberate themselves from both the repressions of the past and those
imposed by Ralph. Indeed, the projection into a beast of those impulses that
they cannot accept in themselves is the beginning of a new mythology. The
earlier dreams and nightmares of individual children are now shared in this
mutual creation.
11.Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud,
trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Modern Library, 1938), p. 834.
When the imaginary demons become defined by the rotting corpse and
floating parachute on the mountain which the boys' terror distorts into a
beast, Jack wants to track the creature down. After the next kill, the head
of the pig is placed upon a stake to placate the beast. Finally one of the
children, Simon, after an epileptic fit, creeps out of the forest at
twilight while the others are engaged in enthusiastic dancing following a
hunt. Seized by the rapture of re-enactment or perhaps terrorized by fear
and night into believing that this little creature is a beast, they circle
Simon, pounce on him, bite and tear his body to death. He becomes not a
substitute for beast but beast itself; representation becomes absolute
identification, "the mystic repetition of the initial event." 12
At the moment of Simon's death, nature speaks as it did at Christ's
crucifixion: a cloud bursts; rain and wind fill the parachute on the hill
and the corpse of the pilot falls or is dragged among the screaming boys.
Both Simon and the dead man, beast and beast, are washed into the sea and
disappear. After this complete resurgence of savagery in accepted ritual,
there is only a short interval before Piggy's remaining lens is stolen, he
is intentionally killed as an enemy, and Ralph, the human being, becomes
hunted like beast or pig.
Simon's mythic and psychological role has earlier been suggested in
this essay. Undersized, subject to epileptic fits, bright-eyed, and
introverted, he constantly creeps away from the others to meditate among the
intricate vines of the forest. To him, as to the mystic, superior knowledge
is intuitively given which he cannot communicate. When the first report of
the beast-pilot reaches camp, Simon, we are told, can picture only "a human
at once heroic and sick." He predicts that Ralph will " 'get back all
right,' " only to be scorned as "batty" by the latter. In each case he sees
the truth, but is overwhelmed with self-consciousness. During the day
preceding his death, he walks away as if in a trance and stumbles upon a
pig's head left in the sand in order to appease the demonic presence the
children's terror has created. Shaman-like, he holds a silent and imaginary
colloquy with it, a severed head covered with innumerable flies. It is
itself the titled Lord of the Flies, a name applied to the Biblical demon
Beelzebub and later used in Goethe's Faust,
12. Ibid., p. 834.
Part 1, to describe Mephistopheles.13 From it he learns that
it is the Beast, and the Beast cannot be hunted because it dwells within
each child. Simon feels the advent of one of his fits. His visual as well as
his auditory perception becomes distorted; the head of the pig seems to
expand, an anticipation or intuition of the discovery of the pilot's corpse,
whose expanding parachute causes the equally distorted perceptions of normal
though frightened children. Suddenly Golding employs a startling image,
"Simon was inside the mouth. He fell down and lost consciousness" (133).
Laterally, this image presents the hallucination of a sensitive child about
to lose control of his rational faculties. Such illusions, or auras,
frequently attend the onset of an epileptic seizure. Mythologically and
symbolically, it recalls the quest in which the hero is swallowed by a
serpent or dragon or beast whose belly represents the underworld, undergoes
a ritual death in order to win the elixer to revitalize his stricken
society, and returns with his knowledge to the timed world as a redeemer. So
Christ, after his descent to the grave and to Hell, returns to redeem
mankind from his fallen state. Psychologically, this figure of speech
connoting the descent into the darkness of death represents the annihilation
of the individual ego, an internal journey necessary for self-understanding,
a return from the timelessness of the unconscious. When Simon wakes from his
symbolic death, he suddenly realizes that he must confront the beast on the
mountain because "what else is there to do?" Earlier he had been unable to
express himself or give advice. Now he is relieved of "that dreadful feeling
of the pressure of personality." When he discovers the corrupted corpse
hanging from the rock, he first frees it in compassion though it is
surrounded by flies, and then staggers unevenly down to report to the
others. He attempts to assume a communal role from which his strangeness and
nervous seizures formerly isolated him. Redeemer and scapegoat, he becomes
the victim of the group he seeks to enlighten. In death- before he is pulled
into the sea-the flies which have moved to his head from the bloodstained
pig and from the decomposing body of the man are replaced by the
phosphorescent creatures of the deep. Halo-like, these "moonbeam-bodied
creatures" attend the seer who has been denied into the
13.Ibid.
formlessness and freedom of the ocean. "Softly, surrounded by a fringe
of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast
constellations, Simon's dead body moved out toward the open sea"
(142).14
Piggy's death, soon to follow Simon's, is foreshadowed when the former
proclaims at council that there is no beast, " 'What would a beast eat?' " "
'Pig.' " " 'We eat pig,' " he rationally answers. " 'Piggy' " (77) is the
emotional response, resulting in a juxtaposition of words which imply
Piggy's role and Golding's meaning. At Piggy's death his body twitches "like
a pig's after it has been killed." Not only has his head been smashed, but
also the conch, symbol of order, is simultaneously broken. A complex group
of metaphors unite to form a total metaphor involving Piggy and the pig,
hunted and eaten by the children, and the pig's head which is at once left
to appease the beast's hunger and is the beast itself. But the beast is
within, and the children are defined by the very objects they seek to
destroy.
In these associated images we have the whole idea of a communal and
sacrificial feast and a symbolic cannibalism, all of which Freud discussed
in Totem and Taboo. Here the psychology of the individual contributes the
configurations for the development of religion. Indeed, the events of Lord
of the Flies imaginatively parallel the patterns which Freud detects in
primitive mental processes.
Having populated the outside world with demons and spirits which are
projections of their instinctual nature, these children-and primitive
men-must then unconsciously evolve new forms of worship and laws, which
manifest themselves in taboos, the oldest form of social repression. With
the exception of the first kill-in which the children still imagine they are
playing at hunting-the subsequent deaths assume a ritual form; the pig is
eaten communally by all and the head is left for the "beast," whose role
consists in sharing the feast. This is much like the "public ceremony"
15 described by Freud in which the sacri-
14.The reader will find it worthwhile to compare Donald R. Spangler's
"Simon," reprinted on pp. 211-215 in this volume, with Professor
Rosenfield's view of Simon.-Eds.
15.There are further affinities to Sartre's Les Mouches.
fice of an animal provided food for the god and his worshipers. The
complex relationships within the novel between the "beast," the pigs which
are sacrificed, the children whose asocial impulses are externalized in the
beast-this has already been discussed. So we see that, as Freud points out,
the "sacrificing community, its god [the 'beast'], and the sacrificial
animal are of the same blood," 16 members of a clan. The pig,
then, may be regarded as a totem animal, an "ancestor, a tutelary spirit and
protector";17 it is, in any case, a part of every child. The
taboo or prohibition against eating particular parts of the totem animal
coincides with the children's failure to eat the head of the pig. It is that
portion which is set aside for the "beast." Just as Freud describes the
primitive feast, so the children's festive meal is accompanied by a frenzied
ritual in which they temporarily release their forbidden impulses and
represent the kill. To consume the pig and to re-enact the event is not only
to assert a "common identity" 18 but also to share a "common
responsibility" for the deed. By this means the children assuage the
enormity of having killed a living thing. None of the boys is excluded from
the feast. The later ritual, in which Simon, as a human substitute
identified with the totem, is killed, is in this novel not an unconscious
attempt to share the responsibility for the killing of a primal father in
prehistoric times, as Freud states; rather, it is here a social act in which
the participants celebrate their new society by commemorating their
severance from the authority or the civilized state. Because of the
juxtaposition of Piggy and pig, the eating of pig at the communal feast
might be regarded as the symbolic cannibalism by which the children
physically partake of the qualities of the slain and share responsibility
for their crime. (It must be remembered that, although Piggy on a symbolic
level represents the light of reason and the authority of the father, as a
human being he shares that bestiality and irrationality which to Golding
dominate all men, even the most rational or civilized.)
In the final action, Ralph is outlawed by the children and hunted like
an animal. One boy, Roger, sharpens a stick at
16. Totem and Taboo, p. 878.
17. Ibid., p. 808,
18. Ibid., p. 914.
both ends so that it will be ready to receive the severed head of the
boy as if he were a pig. Jack keeps his society together because it, like
the brother horde of William Robertson Smith19 and Freud, "is
based on complicity in the common crimes."20 All share the guilt
of having killed Simon, of hunting Ralph down. In his flight Ralph, seeing
the grinning skull of a pig, thinks of it as a toy and remembers the early
days on the island when all were united in play. In the play world, the
world of day, the world of the novel's opening, he has become a "spoilsport"
like Piggy; in the world based upon primitive rites and taboos, the night
world where fears become demons and sleep is like death, he is the heretic
or outcast, the rejected god. This final hunt, after the conch is broken, is
the pursuit of the figure representing civilized law and order; it is the
law and order of a primitive culture. Finally, Jack, through misuse of the
dead Piggy's glasses, accidentally sets the island on fire. A passing
cruiser, seeing the fire, lands to find only a dirty group of sobbing little
boys. " 'Fun and games,' said the officer. . . . 'What have you been doing?
Having a war or something?' " (185).
But are all the meanings of the novel as clear as they seem? To
restrict it to an imaginative re-creation of Freud's theory that children
are little savages, that no child is innocent whatever popular Christian
theology would have us believe, is to limit its significance for the adult
world. To say that the "beasts" we fear are within, that man is essentially
irrational-or, to place a moral judgment on the irrational, that man is
evil-that, again, is too easy. In this forced isolation of a group of
children, Golding is making a statement about the world they have left-a
world that we are told is "in ruins." According to Huizinga's theory of
play, war is a game, a contest for prestige which, like the games of
primitives or of classical athletes, may be fatal. It, too, has its rules,
although the modern concept of total war tends to obscure both its
ritualistic and its ennobling character. It, too, has its spatial and
temporal limitations, as the rash of "limited" wars makes very clear. More
than once the children's acts are compared to those of the outside
19.William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites,
3rd ed., with an introduction by Stanley A. Cook (New York: Macmillan,
1927).
20.Totem and Taboo, p. 916.
world. When Jack first blackens his face like a savage, he gives his
explanation: " 'For hunting. Like in the war. You know-dazzle paint. Like
things trying to look like something else' " (57). Appalled by one of the
ritual dances, Piggy and Ralph discuss the authority and rationality of the
apparently secure world they have left:
"Grownups know things," said Piggy. "They ain't afraid of the dark.
They'd meet and have tea and discuss. Then things 'ud be all right-"
"They wouldn't set fire to the island. Or lose-"
"They'd build a ship-"
The three boys stood in the darkness, striving unsuccessfully to convey
the majesty of adult life.
"They wouldn't quarrel-"
"Or break my specs-"
"Or talk about a beast-"
"If only they could get a message to us," cried Ralph desperately. "If
only they could send us something grown-up . . . a sign or something"
(86-87).
The sign does come that night, unknown to them, in the form of the
parachute and its attached corpse. The pilot is the analogue in the adult
world to the ritual killing of the child Simon on the island; he, like
Simon, is the victim and scapegoat of his society, which has unleashed its
instincts in war. Both he and Simon are associated by a cluster of visual
images. Both are identified with beasts by the children, who do see the
truth-that all men are bestial-but do not understand it. Both he and Simon
attract the flies from the Lord of the Flies, the pig's head symbolic of the
demonic; both he and Simon are washed away by a cleansing but not reviving
sea. His position on the mountain recalls the hanged or sacrificed god of
Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, in which an effigy of the com god is
buried or thrown into the sea to insure fertility among many primitives;
here, however, we have a parody of fertility. He is dead proof that Piggy's
exaggerated respect for adults is itself irrational. When the officer at the
rescue jokingly says, "What have you been doing? Having a war or something?"
this representative of the grown-up world does not understand that the games
of the children, which result in two deaths, are a moral commentary upon the
primitive nature of his own culture. The ultimate irrationality is war.
Paradoxically, the children not only regress to a primitive and infantile
morality, but they also degenerate into adults. They prove that, indeed,
"children are but men of a smaller growth"
Notes on Lord of the Flies1
E. L. EPSTEIN
IN answer to a publicity questionnaire from the American publishers of
Lord of the Flies, William Golding (born Cornwall, 1911) declared that he
was brought up to be a scientist, and revolted; after two years of Oxford he
changed his educational emphasis from science to English literature, and
became devoted to Anglo-Saxon. After publishing a volume of poetry he
"wasted the next four years," and when World War II broke out he joined the
Royal Navy. For the next five years he was involved in naval matters except
for a few months in New York and six months with Lord Cherwell in a
"research establishment." He finished his naval career as a lieutenant in
command of a rocket ship; he had seen action against battleships, submarines
and aircraft, and had participated in the Walcheren and D-Day operations.
After the war he began teaching and writing. Today, his novels include Lord
of the Flies (Coward-McCann), The Inheritors (which may loosely be described
as a novel of prehistory but is, like all of Golding's work, much more), and
Pincher Martin (published in this country by Harcourt Brace as The Two
Deaths of Christopher Martin). He lists his Hobbies as thinking, classical
Greek, sailing and archaeology, and his Literary Influences as Euripides and
the anonymous Anglo-Saxon author of The Battle of Maldon.
The theme of Lord of the Flies is described by Golding as follows (in
the same publicity questionnaire): "The theme is an attempt to trace the
defects of society back
1.This article appeared in the original Capricorn edition of Lord of
the Flies (New York: Putnam's, 1959), 249-55.
to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a
society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any
political system however apparently logical or respectable. The whole book
is symbolic in nature except the rescue in the end where adult life appears,
dignified and capable, but in reality enmeshed in the same evil as the
symbolic life of the children on the island. The officer, having interrupted
a man-hunt, prepares to take the children off the island in a cruiser which
will presently be hunting its enemy in the same implacable way. And who will
rescue the adult and his cruiser?"
This is, of course, merely a casual summing-up on Mr. Golding's part of
his extremely complex and beautifully woven symbolic web which becomes
apparent as we follow through the book, but it does indicate that Lord of
the Flies is not, to say the least, a simple adventure story of boys on a
desert island. In fact, the implications of the story go far beyond the
degeneration of a few children. What is unique about the work of Golding is
the way he has combined and synthesized all of the characteristically
twentieth-century methods of analysis of the human being and human society
and used this unified knowledge to comment on a "test situation." In this
book, as in few others at the present time, are findings of psychoanalysts
of all schools, anthropologists, social psychologists and philosophical
historians mobilized into an attack upon the central problem of modern
thought: the nature of the human personality and the reflection of
personality on society.2
2.Epstein perhaps overstates here. The novel cannot be taken as a final
synthesis of modern thought or as the ultimate comment on the "nature of the
human personality." The boys are not completely free agents; they have been
molded by British civilization for some years before being deposited on the
island. They attempt to establish a government that imitates democracy, they
retain confidence in adults, they, at least for a while, behave in accord
with prior training, as when Roger throws the stones near but not at Henry,
pp. 56-57. Some events that occur depend on circumstance rather than cause
and effect. For example, when the boys ask for a sign from the adult world
(p. 87), the sign conveniently appears (pp. 88-89). The fortuitous arrival
of the cruiser at the climactic moment is also a result of obvious
manipulation on the part of Golding. These maneuvers militate against the
authenticity of the theme. They are not good "evidence."-Eds.
Another feature of Golding's work is the superb use of symbolism, a
symbolism that "works." The central symbol itself, "the lord of the flies,"'
is, like any true symbol, much more than the sum of its parts; but some
elements of it may be isolated. "The lord of the flies" is, of course, a
translation of the Hebrew Ba`alzevuv (Beelzebub in Greek) which means
literally 'lord of insects." It has been suggested that it was a
mistranslation of a mistransliterated word which gave us this pungent and
suggestive name for the Devil, a devil whose name suggests that he is
devoted to decay, destruction, demoralization, hysteria and panic and who
therefore fits in very well with Golding's theme. He does not, of course,
suggest that the Devil is present in any traditional religious sense;
Golding's Beelzebub is the modern equivalent, the anarchic, amoral, driving
Id whose only function seems to be to insure the survival of the host in
which it is embedded or embodied, which function it performs with tremendous
and single-minded tenacity. Although it is possible to find other names for
this force, the modern picture of the personality, whether drawn by
theologians or psychoanalysts, inevitably includes this force or psychic
structure as the fundamental principle of the Natural Man. The tenets of
civilization, the moral and social codes, the Ego, the intelligence itself,
form only a veneer over this white-hot power, this uncontrollable force,
"the fury and the mire of human veins." Dostoievsky found salvation in this
freedom, although he found damnation in it also. Yeats found in it the only
source of creative genius ("Whatever flames upon the night,/ Man's own
resinous heart has fed."). Conrad was appalled by this "heart of darkness,"
and existentialists find in the denial of this freedom the source of
perversion of all human values. Indeed one could, if one were so minded, go
through the entire canon of modern literature, philosophy and psychology and
find this great basic drive defined as underlying the most fundamental
conclusions of modern thought.
The emergence of this concealed, basic wildness is the theme of the
book; the struggle between Ralph, the representative of civilization with
his parliaments and his brain trust (Piggy, the intellectual whose
shattering spectacles mark the progressive decay of rational influence as
the story progresses), and Jack, in whom the spark of wildness burns hotter
and closer to the surface than in Ralph and who is the leader of the forces
of anarchy on the island, is also, of course, the struggle in modern society
between those same forces translated onto a worldwide scale. The central
incident of the book, and the turning point in the struggle between Ralph
and Jack, is the killing of the sow on pp. 123-127). The sow is a mother:
"sunk in deep maternal bliss lay the largest sow of the lot ... the great
bladder of her belly was fringed with a row of piglets that slept or
burrowed and squeaked." The killing of the sow is accomplished in terms of
sexual intercourse.
They were just behind her when she staggered into an open space where
bright flowers grew and butterflies danced around each other and the air was
hot and still.
Here, struck down by the heat, the sow fell and the hunters hurled
themselves at her. This dreadful eruption from an unknown world made her
frantic; she squealed and bucked and the air was full of sweat and noise and
blood and terror. Roger ran round the heap, prodding with his spear whenever
pigflesh appeared. Jack was on top of the sow, stabbing downwards with his
knife. Roger [a natural sadist, who becomes the "official" torturer and
executioner for the tribe] found a lodgment for his point and began to push
till he was leaning with his whole weight. The spear moved forward inch by
inch, and the terrified squealing became a high-pitched scream. Then Jack
found the throat and the hot blood spouted over his hands. The sow collapsed
under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon her. The butterflies still
danced, preoccupied in the center of the clearing.
The entire incident is a horrid parody of an Oedipal wedding night and
these emotions, the sensations aroused by murder and death, and the
overpowering and unaccustomed emotions of sexual love experienced by the
half-grown boys, release the forces of death and the devil on the
island.3
The pig's head is cut off; a stick is sharpened at both ends and
"jammed in a crack" in the earth. (The death planned for Ralph at the end of
the book involves a stick sharpened at both ends.) The pig's head is impaled
on the stick; "... the head hung there, a little blood dribbling down the
stick. Instinctively the boys drew back too; and
3. The reader will wish to compare Epstein's psychoanalytic
interpretation with Claire Rosenfield`s "Men of a Smaller Growth," reprinted
on pp. 261-276.-Eds.
the forest was very still. They listened, and the loudest noise was the
buzzing of flies over the spilled guts." Jack offers this grotesque trophy
to "the Beast," the terrible animal that the littler children had been
dreaming of, and which seems to be lurking on the island wherever they were
not looking. After this occurs the most deeply symbolic incident in the
book, the "interview" of Simon, an embryo mystic, with the head. The head
seems to be saying, to Simon's heightened perceptions, that "Everything is a
bad business. . . . The half-shut eyes were dim with the infinite cynicism
of adult life." Simon fights with all his feeble power against the message
of the head, against the "ancient, inescapable recognition." The recognition
against which he struggles is the revelation to him of human capacities for
evil and the superficial nature of human moral systems. It is the knowledge
of the end of innocence, for which Ralph is to weep at the close of the
book. The pigs head seems to threaten Simon with death and reveals that it
is "the Beast." " 'Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and
kill!' said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly
appreciated places echoed the parody of laughter. '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?' "
At the end of this fantastic scene Simon imagines he is looking into a
vast mouth. "There was blackness within, blackness that spread . . . Simon
was inside the mouth. He fell down and lost consciousness." This
mouth,4 the symbol of ravenous, unreasoning and eternally
insatiable nature, appears again in Pincher Martin, in which the development
of the theme of a Nature inimical to the conscious personality of man is
developed in a stunning fashion. In Lord of the Flies, however, only the
outline of a philosophy is sketched and the boys of the island are figures
in a parable or fable which like all parables or fables contains an inherent
tension between the innocent, time-passing, storytelling aspect of its
surface and the great, "dimly appreciated" depths of its interior.
4.Cf. Conrad's "Heart of Darkness": "I saw [the dying Kurtz] open his
mouth wide-it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he wanted to
swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him." Indeed Golding
seems very dose to Conrad, both in basic principles and in artistic method.
Lord of the Campus1
BACK in England last week after a year in the U. S., British Author
William Golding recalled his interrogation by American college students.
"The question most asked was, 'Is there any hope for humanity?' I very
dutifully said 'yes.' " Golding's credentials for being asked such a
monumental query-and for answering it-rest on one accomplishment: his Lord
of the Flies, a grim parable that holds out precious little hope for
humanity, and is the most influential novel among U. S. undergraduates since
'Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.2
When Lord of the Flies was first published in the U. S. in 1955, it
sold only 2,383 copies, and quickly went out of print. But British
enthusiasm for it has been gradually exported to Ivy League English
departments, and demand for the book is now high. The paperback edition,
published in 1959, has already sold more than 65,000 copies. At the Columbia
University bookstore, it outsells Salinger.
Lord of the Flies is required reading at a hundred U. S. colleges, is
on the list of suggested summer reading for freshmen entering colleges from
Occidental to Williams. At Harvard it is recommended for a social-relations
course on "interpersonal behavior."
An M. I. T. minister uses it for a discussion group on original sin. At
Yale and Princeton-where Salinger, like the three-button suit, has lost some
of his mystique as he
1.The following article is reprinted by permission from Time The Weekly
Newsmagazine; copyright (c) Time Inc. 1962. See "Lord of the Campus," Time,
LXXIX (June 22, 1982), 84.
2.See Golding's remarks on Salinger's novel in the interview by Douglas
M. Davis, "A Conversation with Golding," New Republic, 148 (May 4, 1963),
28-30.-Eds.
becomes adopted by the outlanders-the in-group popularity of Golding's
book is creeping up. At Smith, where Lord of the Flies runs a close second
in sales to Salinger's Franny and Zooey, 1,000 girls turned out for a
lecture by Golding. The reception was the same at the thirty campuses
Golding visited during his year as a rarely writer-in-residence at
Virginia's Hollins College.3
CREATING THEIR OWN MISERY. The British schoolboys in Lord of the Flies
are a fe.w years younger than Salinger's Holden Caulfield-they are six to
twelve-but are not self-pitying innocents in a world made miserable by
adults. They create their own world, their own misery. Deposited unhurt on a
deserted coral island by a plane during an atomic war, they form the
responsible vacation-land democracy that their heritage calls for, and it
gradually degenerates into anarchy, barbarism and murder. When adult rescue
finally comes, they are a tribe of screaming painted savages hunting down
their elected leader to tear him apart. The British naval officer who finds
them says, "I should have thought that a pack of British boys would have
been able to put up a better show than that." Then he goes back to his own
war.
Says Golding: "The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society
back to the defects of human nature. Before the war, most Europeans believed
that man could be perfected by perfecting society. We all saw a hell of a
lot in the war that can't be accounted for except on the basis of original
evil."
"PEOPLE I KNEW IN CAMP." What accounts for the appeal? Part of it is,
of course, pure identification. A Harvard undergraduate says the book
"rounds up all the people I knew in camp when I was a counselor." On another
level, Golding believes students "seem to have it in for the whole world of
organization. They're very cynical. And here was someone who was not making
excuses for society. It was
3. See Golding's series of four articles on his visit to the United
States. "Touch of Insomnia," Spectator, 207 (October 27, 1961), 569-70;
"Glass Door," Spectator, 207 (November 24, 1961), 732-33; "Body and Soul,"
Spectator, 208 (January 19, 1962), 65-66; "Gradus ad Parnassum," Spectator,
208 (September 7, 1962), 327-519.-Eds.
new to find someone who believes in original sin." The prickly belief
in original sin is not Golding's only unfashionable stand. Under questioning
by undergraduates, he cheerfully admitted he has read "absolutely no
Freud"4 (he prefers Greek plays in the original) and said there
are no girls on the island because he does not believe that "sex has
anything to do with humanity at this level."
At 51, bearded, scholarly William Golding claims to have been writing
for 44 years-through childhood in Cornwall, Oxford, wartime duty as a naval
officer, and 19 years as a schoolmaster. Golding claims to be an
optimist-emotionally if not intellectually-and has a humor that belies the
gloomy themes of his allegories. One critical appraisal of Lord of the Flies
that impressed him came from an English schoolboy who went to an island near
Puerto Rico last year to make a movie based oh the book. Wrote the little
boy from the idyllic island, surrounded by his happy peers and pampered by
his producer: "I think Lord of the Flies stinks. I can't imagine what I'm
doing on this filthy island, and it's all your fault." In Golding's view, a
perfectly cast savage.
4. An excellent "Freudian" analysis of Lord of the Flies appears in
Claire Rosenfield's "Men of a Smaller Growth: A Psychological Analysis of
William Golding's Lord of the Flies," Literature and Psychology, XI (Autumn,
1961), 93-101. Reprinted, in a revised version, on pp. 261-276 in this
volume.-Eds.
A Checklist of Publications
Relevant to Lord of the Flies
Allen, Walter, "New Novels." New Statesman, XLVIII (September 25,
1954), 370.
Amis, Kingsley, New Maps of Hell. New York: Ballantine Books, 1960, pp.
17 (note), 24, and 152.
Baker, James R., "Introduction." In Lord of the Flies: Text, Notes and
Criticism, edited by James R. Baker and Arthur P. Ziegler, Jr. New York:
Capricorn Books, 1964. An earlier version entitled "Why It's No Go" appeared
in Arizona Quarterly, 19 (Winter, 1963), 293-305.
Bowen, John, "Bending Over Backwards." Times Literary Supplement
(October 23,1959), 608.
"One Man's Meat: The Idea of Individual Responsibility to Golding`s
Fiction." Times Literary Supplement, (August 7,1959), 146.
Broes, Arthur T., "The Two Worlds of William Golding." Carnegie Series
in English, No. 7 (1963), 1-7.
Golby, Vineta, "William Golding." Wilson Library Bulletin, XXXVII
(February, 1963), 505.
Coskren, Thomas M., O. P., "Is Golding Calvinistic?" America, 109 (July
6,1963), 18-20.
Cox, C. B., "Lord of the Flies." Critical Quarterly, 2 (Summer, 1960),
112-17.
Davis, Douglas M., "Golding, The Optimist, Belies His Somber Pictures
and Fiction." National Observer (September 17, 1962), 17.
Drew, Philip, "Second Reading." Cambridge Review, 78 (1956), 78-84.
Egan, John M., "Golding's View of Man.' America, 108 (January 26,
1963), 140-41.
Epstein, E. L., "Notes on Lord of the Flies" In Lord of the Flies. New
York; Capricorn Books, 1959, pp. 249-55.
Forster, E. M., "Introduction." In Lord of the Flies. New York:
Coward-McCann, Inc., 1962, pp. ix-xii.
Freedman, Ralph, "The New Realism: The Fancy of William Golding."
Perspective, 10 (Summer-Autumn, 1958), 118-28.
Fuller, Edmund, "Behind the Vogue: A Rigorous Understanding." New York
Herald Tribune (November 4, 1962), 3.
Gindin, James, " 'Gimmick' and Metaphor in the Novels of William
Golding." Modern Fiction Studies, 6 (Summer, 1960), 145-52. Reprinted in
Gindin's Postwar British Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1962, pp. 196-206.
Golding, J. T. C., "Letter to James R. Baker." In Lord of the Flies:
Text, Notes and Criticism, edited by James R. Baker and Arthur P. Ziegler,
Jr. New York: Capricorn Books, 1964.
Golding, William, "The Ladder and the Tree." The Listener, 63 (March
24, 1960), 531-33.
"Islands." Spectator, 204 (June 10, 1960), 844-46.
''Billy the Kid." Spectator, 205 (November 25, I960), 808.
Grande, Luke M., "The Appeal of Golding." Commonweal, LXXVII (January
25, 1963), 457-59.
Green, Peter, "The World of William Golding." A Review of English
Literature, 1 (April, 1960), 62-72.
Gregor, Ian, and Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, "Introduction." In Lord of the
Flies. London: Faber and Faber School Editions, 1962, pp. i-xii.
"The Strange Case of Mr. Golding and His Critics." The Twentieth
Century, CLXVII (February, 1960), 115-25.
Halle, Louis J. "Lord of the Flies" Saturday Review, 38 (October
15,1955), 16.
Hannon, Leslie, "William Golding: Spokesman for Youth." Cavalier, 13
(December, 1963), 10-12, 92-93.
Hewitt, Douglas, "New Novels." The Manchester Guardian LXXI (September
28, 1954), 4.
Hynes, Sam, "Novels of a Religious Man." Commonweal, 71 (March 18,
1960), 673-75.
Irwin, Joseph J., "The Serpent Coiled Within." Motive, 23 (May 1963),
1-5.
Karl, Frederick R., "The Novel as Moral Allegory." In Karl's The
Contemporary English Novel. New York: The Noonday Press, 1962, pp. 254-60.
Kearns, Francis E., "Salinger and Golding: Conflict on the Campus."
America, 108 (January 26, 1963), 136-39.
Kearns, Francis E., and Grande, Luke M., "An Exchange of Views."
Commonweal, LXXVII (February 22, 1963), 569-71.
Keating, James, and William Golding, "The Purdue Interview." Printed in
part in Lord of the Flies: Text, Notes and Criticism, edited by James R.
Baker and Arthur P. Ziegler, Jr. New York: Capricorn Books, 1964.
Kermode, Frank, "Coral Island." The Spectator, CCI (August 22,1958),
257.
----, "The Novels of William Golding." International Literary Annual,
No. 3 (1961), 11-29. Reprinted in Kermode's Puzzles and Epiphanies. New
York: Chilmark Press, 1962, pp. 198-213.
Kermode, Frank, and William Golding, "The Meaning of It All." Books and
Bookmen, 5 (October, 1959), 9-10.
Leed, Jacob R., "Lord of the Flies." Dimension, Supplement to Daily
Northwestern (January, 1963), 7-11.
"Lord of the Campus." Time, 79 (June 22, 1962), 64.
"Lord of the Flies" America, 109 (October 5, 1963), 398.
Maclure, Millar, 'William Golding's Survival Stories." Tamarack Review,
4 (Summer, 1957), 60-67.
Maclure, Millar, "Allegories of Innocence." Dalhousie Review, 40
(Summer, 1960), 144-56.
MacShane, Frank, "The Novels of William Golding." Dalhousie Review, 42
(Summer, 1962), 171-83.
Marcus, Steven, "The Novel Again." Partisan Review, 29 (Spring, 1962),
179-84.
Mueller, William R., "An Old Story Well Told." Christian Century, 80
(October 2,1963), 1203-06.
Nelson, William, William Golding's Lord of the Flies: A Source Book.
New York: Odyssey Press, 1963.
Niemeyer, Carl, "The Coral Island Revisited." College English, 22
(January, 1961), 241-45.
Nordell, Roderick, "Book Report." Christian Science Monitor (December
27,1962), n.p.
Oldsey, Bern, and Weintraub, Stanley, "Lord of the Flies: Beelzebub
Revisited." College English, 25 (November, 1963), 90-99.
Peter, John, "The Fables of William Golding." Kenyon Review,
19 (Autumn, 1957), 577-92.
Pritchett, V. S., "Secret Parables." New Statesman (August 2, 1958),
146-47.
Rosenfield, Claire, "Men of a Smaller Growth: A Psychological Analysis
of William Golding's Lord of the Flies." Literature and Psychology, 11
(Autumn, 1961), 93-101.
Spangler, D. R., "Simon." In Lord of the Flies: Text, Notes and
Criticism, edited by James R. Baker and Arthur P. Ziegler, Jr. New York:
Capricorn Books, 1964.
Stem, James, "English Schoolboys in the Jungle." New York Times Book
Review (October 23, 1955), 38.
Trilling, Lionel, "Lord of the Flies" The Mid-Century, Issue 45
(October, 1962), 10-12.
Wain, John, "Lord of the Agonies." Aspect, No. 3 (April, 1963), 56-57.
Walters, Margaret, 'Two Fabulists: Golding and Camus." Melbourne
Critical Review, No. 4 (1961), 18-29.
Wasserstrom, William, and Rosenfield, Claire, "An Exchange of Opinion
Concerning William Golding's Lord of the Flies."
Literature and Psychology, 12 (Winter, 1962), 2-3, 11-12.
Young, Wayland, "Letter from London." Kenyon Review, 19 (Summer, 1957),
477-82.