46 pages • 1 hour read
William GoldingLord of the Flies
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1954A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Sound of the Shell”
From the wreck of a downed airplane that cut a scar through the jungle, two figures emerge: Ralph, tall and handsome, with fair hair, and Piggy, short and fat with thick-rimmed glasses, who implores Ralph not to tell the others his nickname is Piggy. Ralph is delighted with the island, and the fact that there are no grownups near. Piggy’s stomach is upset, and he keeps trundling off into the bushes to use the bathroom. On the beach Ralph takes off his clothes and swims, completely relaxed, unafraid of their circumstances. Piggy can’t swim because of his asthma, but he sees a conch shell in the water. When Ralph retrieves it, Piggy tells him how to blow it. Ralph raises the conch, summoning the other boys from the plane crash. When all arrive, they decide to elect a leader, choosing Ralph, even though Piggy is smarter and Jack, leader of a boys’ choir, has more leadership skills. Ralph, Simon, and Jack decide to see if the island is actually an island; Piggy is told not to come. They climb to the top, passing trails made by animals, stopping once to push a giant boulder off the mountainside into the forest below. At the top they see it is an island and realize that they are marooned on the island. On the way down, they find a small piglet stuck in the jungle vines. Jack hesitates with his knife, and the piglet runs away, but Jack swears he will not hesitate the next time, slamming his knife into a tree to emphasize his point.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Fire on the Mountain”
When Ralph comes back down the mountain he blows the conch again, and the others gather. He tells them they’re on an uninhabited island, and it may be some time before they are rescued. He says they can’t have everyone talking at once, so, as in school, they’ll raise hands, and whomever Ralph recognizes to speak will get the conch. Jack says they’ll need hunters. Piggy points out that no one knows where they are, so they may be there a while, but Ralph says it’s a good island—they have food and water, they can hunt pigs, and they’ll have a good time until the grownups rescue them. One of the small boys says he saw a snake-thing, “a beastie” (35), but Ralph insists there is no beast here. He asserts again that they will be rescued: a ship will come by and save them, and they only need to help with a signal. At this point, the other boys rush up the mountain and begin to gather wood for a fire. They drag up old rotten logs in a blowdown part of the forest and use Piggy’s glasses to start a fire, but the wood is so old and dry it goes up in flames in seconds, producing little smoke. Jack says his men will man the fire, throwing on green branches when a ship is sighted. He agrees they need more rules—they aren’t savages, after all. But Piggy isn’t placated. He says they are acting like a bunch of children, not listening to Ralph, running off to do whatever strikes them at the moment. While he is talking, the forest below catches fire. Piggy, laughing, says that they could have burned down the whole forest and maintains that they should have built shelters. Piggy also points out that they don’t know where all the kids are. Beneath them, the fire burns on.
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
Ralph is the first character to emerge from the jungle. He is unperturbed by the plane crash and is delighted by the idea that there are no grownups around. His realized ambition—to be his own boss, without the rules and regulations of grownups—is here. Piggy is next to emerge, although he is caught in the creeper vines of the jungle in much the same way the piglet is caught at the end of the chapter. Piggy is short and fat, with asthma and poor vision. He contrasts sharply with fair and tall Ralph. Ralph is fit, an alpha male, and Piggy is small and weak. Piggy is intelligent, but his intelligence will win him no awards here, where only the strong will survive. It is Piggy who finds the conch, but he has no breath to blow it. Instead, Ralph does, summoning the other survivors to him, which helps him, along with the power of the conch, to get elected as leader. Since the men with megaphones are not around—the men who herded the boys onto planes and away from a war where the atom bomb was soon to be dropped—the conch, a primitive tool, becomes their mouthpiece. With conch in hand, Ralph is elected leader over the more intelligent Piggy and the more experienced leader Jack. It is Ralph’s alpha nature, which none of the children would be able to define, that causes them to elect him. They think that he is the fittest among them, to lead as well as to survive. As Ralph, Jack, and Simon climb the mountain, they leave Piggy behind. While climbing, they come across a piglet stuck in the creeper vines, an ominous foreshadowing of Piggy’s fate.
On the beach after blowing the conch, Ralph begins to build a government. Whoever speaks must have the conch, Ralph says, much in the same way members of Parliament must be recognized by the chair to have the floor. Jack and his choir will be the army, the hunters. The children all decide to build a fire, and while gathering wood, work together systematically for the greater good. Their progress is reminiscent of the progress of early man: fire, government, armies. England is at war, evident because of the evacuation and the reference to the bomb. Justas the children are stranded at sea after the onset of the nuclear war, the next step in their own social progress will be toward war and savagery.
Their progress is also problematic in other ways:the boys continually interrupt the conch-speaker; they run off as soon as Ralph mentions fire; and they make no plans to contain or control the fire. The latter later leads to them burning down the forest. Jack says they aren’t savages, but all signs point to the fact that they are. The government they try to build is weak at best, much in the same the government structures of the old world, the world they’ve left behind, must have been weak enough to break down into war. They fail to protect the children in the same way the old world failed to protect them—Piggy says they don’t know where some of the children are. The one with the mark on his face is missing, last seen down in the fire, much the same way they themselves have been left in the fire by the old governments.
