The book reaches a turning point at the next, improvised, hunt of the boar. What started as a harmless exploration for the beast becomes a bloodthirsty chase of the boar. Ralph is delighted when he hits the boar ‘and the spear stuck in a bit’ and he decides ‘that hunting was good after all’. Things take a more sinister turn when the boys decide to re-enact the hunt.
After the first, successful hunt in which Jack kills the pig, the hunters replay events by forming a ring, ‘Maurice pretended to be the pig and ran squealing into the centre, and the hunters...pretended to beat him’. This is harmless game, during which the hunters dance around the ‘pig’, singing their hunting chant of “Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Bash her in.” The corruption of purity and goodness is seen when the boys play the same ‘game’ after their next (failed) hunt. This time Robert is the squealing pig, trapped in the centre of circle, the hunters circling him, singing their warrior chant. The game soon ceases to playful, as Robert’s ‘mock terror’ turns to pain. The others are seized with a desire to “Kill him! Kill him!” uncaring of the fact that Robert is human, one of them, and not a pig. ‘Robert was screaming and struggling’, yet he ceases to become a person and is now merely an object by which their thirst to kill might be quenched. Jack ‘was brandishing his knife...Ralph was fighting...to get a handful of that brown, vulnerable flesh...the desire...to hurt was over-mastering”, Golding causes this to be important incident in the novel, the beginnings of a full realisation of Simon’s belief that “maybe there is a beast...maybe it’s only us,” is not a comment to be jeered at, for it is a frightening comprehension of reality.
Robert escapes with a few, physical injuries, crying out, in an effort to lighten to the situation “Oh, my bum!” Ralph tries to convince that it was “just a game”, like ‘rugger’. This uneasiness is justified when the boys discuss methods of improving their ‘game’. Robert believes that they “want a real pig...because you’ve got to kill him”. Jack, not altogether jokingly, suggests that they should “Use a littlun.” This suggestion is made more disturbing by the reaction of the other boys, for instead of being horrified, ‘everybody laughed’. Golding’s brief ending to the passage leaves us disgusted by the callousness of Jack’s remark and of his flippant attitude to the murder of a fellow human being, but it is worryingly representative of the callousness humankind. Jack’s ‘joke’ warns us of the increase of evil on the island, for the idea of using a ‘littlun’, may soon stop being an idea and become a reality.
The passage is disturbing because we see that the boys’ lust for blood and death is indiscriminate of whether their victim is an animal or human. Killing is not a means of providing food for the boys; it is a way of satisfying their longing to cause pain and destruction. They are desperate to kill, a mere pig is not enough, they are not worth the trouble of a hunt, and their next victim shall be a human, for it will increase the enjoyment of their game.
The boys do not care for the adventure of the hunt. They want only the exhilaration of killing, the sight of the blood and the joy of controlling the existence of another being. In order for a pig to be killed, it must first be found. The hassle of a search can be avoided by substituting the pig with a human. It is almost inevitable that the boys gratify their lust with human blood, perhaps with the blood of a ‘littlun’.
The ‘game’ is a horrifying example of how evil humanity can be. The dark side of human nature thinks nothing of killing a friend. We are shocked by Ralph’s longing to cause pain, Jack’s desire to stab Robert with his knife and Roger ‘fighting to get close’. But the thing that frightens us the most is the fact that this is not a figment of Golding’s imagination, Ralph, Jack and the other islanders are not irrelevant fiction, for human kind is capable of great evil. I feel that the passage in the book is disturbing because it shows us how horrifyingly able we are to be unfeeling and cruel.
Joelaine Fitch 10L
