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.
Themes
The Human Beast
Simon tries to say that the beast is the boys themselves, but he can’t get the words out. At first, the beast is only a fear of the littluns, a nightmare conjured from their circumstances of fleeing a war and crash-landing on an island. The beast could also be an animal like a boar or a snake, or even something they’ve never seen. It is the darkness at night, the unfamiliar surroundings, the sudden recognition they are on their own.
The beast is also the fears of man. The boys allow these fears to get inside them. They begin to fear each other. The split between Ralph and Jack grows and grows. Jack wants to hunt—he thinks the best way of staying alive is to arm themselves, to hunt and kill, while Ralph wants to keep hope alive and wait for rescue. The beast comes before either thing happens. When the pilot parachutes onto the island, the boys don’t recognize it as a man. In the darkness—not just the darkness of night, but the darkness of all their fears—they don’t recognize humanity any longer.
“[M]aybe it’s only us” (89), Simon tries to muster, and so it is. The boys allow fear to get inside them and become the very thing they fear—the darkness, the hatred, the teeth and claws of a beast.
Survival of the Fittest
Ralph and Jack, as the two biggest boys, become the leaders. The boys separate themselves by size. They name themselves by size: bigguns and littluns. The littluns sit together while the hunters stay together: “On his left the larger boys who had not known each other before the evacuation; before him small children squatted in the grass” (32). Ralph is chosen for his size:
Jack started to protest but the clamor changed from the general wish for a chief to an election by acclaim of Ralph himself. None of the boys could have found good reason for this; what intelligence had been shown was traceable to Piggy, while the most obvious leader was Jack. But there was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was his size (22).
Intelligence isn’t valued, nor is leadership. They vote on Ralph’s animal nature, not what they would choose in a traditional government.
The reason for this is they are already, from the moment they land on the island, turning into animals, or“savages” (91), as they are described later. Jack’s hunters finally do away with any traditional form of government.The break the conch and kill Piggy, the voice of reason, and later kill Simon via ruling by mob mentality, on the basis of their strength. At the end, when any of them disagree with Jack, he beats them. He overpowers them, ties them up, and beats them, a way of asserting his strength. When Ralph tries to reason, Jack attacks him, like an animal that relies only on strength.
The Individual Versus Society
The littluns refuse to work, and the hunters let the fire go out. Jack and Ralph become embroiled in a power struggle. The bigguns fail to watch after the littluns and lose one of them. Piggy and Ralph try to maintain order, but their rules are disobeyed. Each person acting out of his own interest breaks down the society. The charactershighlight how easily society breaks down when each individual looks after his own interests. Jack wants to kill a pig, so he removes his hunters from the fire and misses a chance to be rescued. This in turn causes the schism between Jack and Ralph. The littluns would rather play than build shelters, which contributes to their fear of the beast because they sleep out in the open. They can’t even be bothered to use the bathroom in the designated places, so they drop their waste everywhere. In the end, because Jack wants Ralph to be killed, the boys end up burning down the entire island, which is essentially their entire world.
