taken away all colour from the scene and made it seem to be taking place in black and white.
When colour does appear, it is green “Green lights of nausea”, brought before Ralph’s eyes by his
unexpected contact with “the cold soft ashes of the fire”, a sensation which makes him almost
physically sick. When the ashes blow into his face from the dead fire (darkness and death seem
linked in this frightening place) Ralph almost faints as “the top of the mountain was sliding
sideways”. Fainting on the top of this mountain with the lagoon and reef so far below would be very
dangerous and makes the reader frightened for Ralph. Jack taunts Ralph by asking if he’s scared.
Golding uses a much more powerful word than Jack’s schoolboyish one; Ralph’s fear has for a
moment “paralysed” him, making him incapable of movement.
The sounds Golding describes are the sounds of fear. Twice the wind is said to roar, like an
animal, hungry to swallow them. Roger’s breath is “a hiss” as if fear has turned him into something
less than human. Ralph hears the chattering of his own teeth, another sign of how frightening this
moment is.
Golding builds up tension in the extract to make it still more frightening. The boys see close to
them “a rocklike hump where no rock should be”. After two “leaden” steps that show Ralph’s
reluctance to approach this “hump”, the sudden sliver of moon reveals the frightening figure of “a
great ape” now asleep but ready to wake up and terrify the boys. Finally, as the wind again roars,
“the creature lifted head” and they see “the ruin of a face”, like some horror from a nightmare. This
is the climax of the extract and the boys run in terror.
The boys have no idea that they have seen a dead parachutist, whose parachute has been caught
by the wind making the body appear to move and come alive. This extract confirms their worst
fears; that they are on an island inhabited by a beast ready to prey on them. The extract is
frightening to a reader, and shows why the boys report to the others that there really is a beast on
the island.