Golding also sees the evil side of humanity coming out as rules and order break down. Many things go wrong; the murders of Piggy and Simon, ‘the blue-white scar was constant, the noise unendurable. Simon was crying out something about a dead man on a hill. Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! Do him in! The sticks fell and the mouth of the new circle crunched and screamed. The beast was on its knees in the centre, its arms folded over its face. It was crying out against the abominable noise something about a body on the hill. The beast struggled forward, broke the ring and fell over the steep edge of the rock to the sand by the water. At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt onto the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore. There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws’. There was also a dispute over leadership between Ralph and Jack, and one of the most important things to do wrong, which sets the tone for the rest of the book.
The main characters in the book are Ralph, Jack, Piggy and Simon. Ralph is the central character of the novel. Jack is the only other character who is close in physical stature to Ralph. This is appropriate since these characters represent the two ways of life on the island.
Golding uses Ralph do represent the perfect human, someone who does good but isn’t so perfect that he can’t relate to human temptations. This is what Ralph is like at the beginning of the novel. Towards the end of the story, Ralph becomes less like Piggy, the good side, and grows closer to Jack, the chaotic side of human nature.
In some ways Ralph represents the human ego. He must find the middle ground between the ‘if it feels good do it’ attitude of Jack and the strict obedience to the logic and order of the adult world (symbolized through Piggy). After Piggy’s death, Ralph finds it impossible to decide what action to take next. This goes along with Golding’s view that if left alone, human nature will naturally be pulled to evil side of a human’s personality. Jack is the leading believer of lawlessness on the island. He is the leader of the savage tribe that hunts the pigs. Disagreeing with Ralph and Piggy on almost all matters, Jack represents the immorality of someone’s personality; he supports the concept that one’s wishes are most important and should be followed, In spite of reason or morals.
Jack is the kind of person that Golding believed everyone would eventually become if left alone to set their own standards and live the way they naturally wanted. He believed that the natural state of humans is chaos and that man is naturally evil. When reason is discarded, only the strong survive. Jack personifies this idea completely. It’s no coincidence that Piggy’s nickname is such; the overpowering emotion Jack and his hunters have to "kill the pig" is an roundabout way and clever author metaphor to suggest the boys are also killing a part of Piggy. While Jack and his gang continue to kill more pigs, the logic and reason, which Piggy symbolizes increasingly diminishes. Piggy represents the law and order of the adult world. He is the part of man’s personality that attempts to follow a set of strict rules. Throughout the novel, Piggy attempts to form the island society to reflect the society they all lived in, in England. Piggy’s constant references to his auntie demonstrate this view. He tries to pull Ralph towards the reason and logic side of human nature.
Piggy is obsessed with the fire. This is because he wants to return to England where adults are, but also because the fire is one of the only symbols of order on the island. When the fire goes out, Piggy mentally collapses. Finally Simon, he shares the experiences of both the ‘littluns’ and the older boys. He has the innocence and feelings of littluns but the knowledge of the ‘biguns’.
However, Simon is alienated from the rest of the group. He takes life much more seriously than the others, being weighed down with a certain moral awareness that the other boys don’t understand. Simon is unique because he can actually hear the voice of the beast. He realizes that the beast is not something one can kill because it’s inside the boys.
Most importantly, Simon makes the connection between the dead parachutist and the Lord of the Flies. He understands that with the death of the man in the parachute, that symbolizes the death of reason.
Lord of the Flies is definitely not just an adventure story; it has so many hidden meanings and metaphors for other things. In some ways, Lord of the Flies is not that different from the book ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell. Orwell uses a farm and pigs to represent communism, and also he too uses a lot of metaphors to symbolize other things. The two plots also have their similarities. Even though the boys crash onto the island, and the pigs overthrow the farmer, they both have to fend for themselves, create a fully functional society with rules and order, but as in both books, the fact that there is no one around to really enforce the rules, the idea of society breaks down and one person emerges strongest and both groups end up being evil, reverting to the evil side of a persons ego in Lord of the Flies and some of the pigs turning nearly into man, which is what they were attempting to get away from in the first place.
