A decided military authoritarian, ordering his choir as if they were troops, allowing room for neither discussion nor dissent, he significantly chooses for his choir the role of hunters; he selects that task which is most violent and, in this society, most related to military values. However, as his inability to kill the pig demonstrates, Jack is not yet accustomed to violence. Jack must prepare himself to commit a violent act, for he is still constrained by societal rules that oppose this behavior; his authoritarian attitude has given him a predisposition to violence, but he must shed the lessons of society before he can kill.
In both temperament and physical appearance, Ralph is the antithesis of Jack. Ralph is idealized from the beginning, praised lavished on his physical beauty, and it soon becomes obvious to the reader why other boys would look up to him and be endeared to him, rather than be frightened by him; ‘There was a mildness about his mouth and eyes that proclaimed no devil.’ In the island sun he immediately achieves a golden hue, a physical manifestation of his inward qualities. Ralph is no great intellect and even behaves somewhat childish in his first encounter with Piggy, but otherwise he has a gravity and maturity beyond his years. He is charismatic, and a natural leader, a quality that the other boys recognize when they vote him ‘Chief’; ‘There was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out… most powerful, there was the conch.’
The conch shell is a powerful symbol of civilization and order in the novel, more still because it is associated with Ralph; the shell effectively governs the boys’ meetings, for the boy who holds the shell holds the right to speak; a symbol of political legitimacy and democratic power, which epitomises what Ralph represents in the novel. He has a fair, open nature, and goes furthest out of any boy in the group to accepting Piggy, the group’s social pariah. Unlike most of the other boys, who are initially solely concerned with having fun, Ralph sets about building huts and thinking of ways to maximize their chances of being rescued; for this reason, Ralph’s power and influence over the other boys are secure at the beginning of the novel.
The vote for chief establishes a conflict, which becomes to blame for a large majority for what goes wrong on the island, between the different values espoused by Jack and Ralph. Jack assumes that he should assume the role automatically, while Ralph actually achieves it reluctantly by vote. Ralph therefore comes to represent a democratic ethos. Though they are guardedly friendly towards one another at the beginning of the novel, eventually Jack grows tired of Ralph being in charge, letting the barbarism inside of him transform him into a savage-like creature, destroying the makeshift civilization the boys, Ralph, work so hard to create; other boys, seeing the appeal in this way of life, begin to follow him.
The freedom Jack discovers on the island coupled with his malicious and arrogant personality made it possible for him to quickly degenerate into a savage. He puts on paint, first to camouflage himself from the pigs. But he discovers that the paint allows him to hide the forbidden thoughts in his mind that his facial expressions would otherwise betray. ‘The mask was a thing on its own behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness.’ The balance of power shifts, and as Ralph’s position declines precipitously while ’s rises; this is the descending move from civilization into savagery, from building shelters to sleeping rough, from eating fruit to killing pigs, from things going right to going wrong.
A smaller, but important point of conflict, is Piggy. Piggy, an educated boy condemned to be an outcast because of his aesthetic unattractiveness, as well as his asthma, which prevents him from taking part in activities the rest of the boys so, is marked out; it is the expense of his illness that the others have a lot of fun, referring to it as ‘ass-mar’, though it is more their ignorance about the condition that leads them to taunt him. Due to his academic childhood, he is more mature than the others and retained his civilized behaviour, and his experience of life gives him a more realistic understanding of the cruelty possessed by some people. However, the boys are too young to value the intelligence and pragmatic thinking Piggy offers them, and use him as a target to vent their own frustrations; in particular, his name as a constant source of amusement; ‘The boys were a closed circuit of sympathy with Piggy outside.’ Ralph, for the most part, in accordance to his fair nature treats Piggy with more respect than the others, which inevitably lowers his own status in the hierarchical standings; Jack, to some extent, becomes jealous of their friendship, which also contributes to the breakdown of relationships between himself and Ralph.
Another large conflict, equal to that which goes on between Ralph and Jack is the conflict between the entire group and the ‘Beastie’. The younger boys begin to have nightmares about a monster that supposedly inhabits the island; this monster is the titular ‘character’ of the novel, the Lord of the Flies. The Beastie symbolizes the Devil, and is a manifestation of all the evil inside the boys; in fact, the name “Lord of the Flies” is a literal translation of the name of the biblical name Beelzebub, a powerful demon in hell sometimes thought to be the devil himself. Their terror of this monster both unites and divides the boys; it unites them in the sense it gives them all a common enemy, and at points, drives away other in-group conflicts, but as different characters have different ideas as to, at first, whether the beast actually exists and then eventually how to deal with it, it causes even more strife to the already tense atmosphere building on the island.
The separation of peers due to the conflicts between Ralph and Jack, Jack and society, Piggy and the boys, and the boys and Beastie are what is going wrong on the island, and the reasons behind it. Human tendency to obey rules, behave peacefully, and follow orders is imposed by a system that is not in itself a fundamental part of human nature. Young boys are a fitting illustration of this premise; left to their own devices, they often behave with instinctive cruelty and violence, which perfectly explains their demise from civilisation to savagery. However, not everyone has so much malevolence hidden inside themselves as to become complete savages when released from the boundaries of our society. Some people will, because of the ways they were conditioned, remember and abide by the rules they had depended on for social organization and security, but sadly, in this instance, they did not, which is why, and Ralph will come to realise this at the end of the novel, things on the island go wrong.
http://www.deliriumsrealm.com/delirium/mythology/beelzebub.asp#flies
