Besides, the killing of the pig refers subtly to the boys’ aggression towards female. ‘They become ‘wedded to her in lust as they hurl themselves at her the violence has unmistakably sexual undertones’ (Kinkead-Weekes, Mark and Ian Gregor: 42). The ‘slogan’ they shout after killing the pig is “Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood” (p72). Here Golding defines the pig as female by using ‘her’ and this demonstrates the hunters’ first ‘sexual relation’ with female. During the hunt, Jack shows his aggressiveness towards the pig from his words, ‘There was lashings of blood,’ said Jack, laughing and shuddering, ‘[Ralph] should have seen it!’ (p73) Sex and death are the knowledge from the Tree of Knowledge in Eden, they are the knowledge that Adam and Eve that led to be expelled from Eden, the formation of original sin. When the boys get the knowledge of sex and death, they lose their innocence like Adam and Eve and they are no longer belong to this paradise.
In this novel, Golding presents to the readers the idea that the island is a miniature of the real world and the children are like little adults. He interprets his idea of what the world and human beings are like throughout the novel. ‘For Golding, the Evil Tree grows in the human brain, in human consciousness, and emblematic and conceptual reduction are dangerous manifestations of the Fall’ (Kinkead-Weekes, Mark and Ian Gregor: p21). The quote ‘the darkness of man’s heart’, in my opinion, relates to the title of the novel, the Lord of the Flies. In the novel, the ‘lord of the flies’ refers to the pig’s head but I think it is actually the symbol of Satan. Simon knows that there is no physical beast nor the ‘Lord of the flies’, the beast actually exists in all human’s hearts; it is part of the human beings, their fear towards everything out of their control and mysterious. At the beginning of the novel, Golding has already suggested that human beings are evil by using the word ‘scar’ to mean the crashed plane. Scar is associated with ugliness and is unwanted by everyone. Golding relates the ugliness with the inventions of human beings and this association shows that human beings bring destruction and disasters to this beautiful and paradise-like island.
The schoolboys become savage and evil because there are no adults on the island. In their minds, adults mean laws and orders, so without their existence, they can do whatever they want, even to hurt and kill their friends. The setting of the novel is an isolated island that is far away from civilization and wars. At first, the children are still bound by their civilization: the rules, the ideas of right and wrong and the things they were taught in their old lives are still deep inside their minds. For instance, Roger fails to aim the stones at Henry because he feels uneasy of these wrongdoings. However, later in this setting, an island, without law and adults, becomes a place that makes the children go wild., as said in the illusionary dialogue of Simon with the Lord of the flies, ‘We are going to have fun on this island’. Similar to what the children have thought before, they think they will have fun because there are no adults. However, we can see they play war games with violence, for example, in p6, “Ralph danced out into the hot air of the beach and then returned as a fighter-plane, with wings swept back, and machine-gunned Piggy”. The idea of ‘fun’ is twisted from just pretending to kill to finally the real murder of Piggy and Simon.
The appear of the navy officer at the end of novel gives us a new insight, as C B Cox says, ‘[The officer’s] trim cruiser, the sub-machine gun, revolver and row of gilt buttons, are only more sophisticated substitutes for the war-paint and sticks of Jack and his followers’ (C B Cox: p121). The navy officer – an adult saves the children from the ‘hell’ and makes them become civilized again, then who can save the adult from the world of wars? Here I impose a question: if laws and orders are used to bind human beings, then are the adults really bound by them? We can see an irony here, adults do start wars and kill one another, and we can read all these terrible deeds from history books and even the daily newspapers. The navy officer ‘too is chasing men in order to kill’ (C B Cox: p121). Human beings invent laws to control and bind others’ behavior, to prevent them from exploiting others; parents teach their own children the correct way to behave; police keep the orders of the society and prevent people from violating the laws; soldiers protect their own countries and fight against the enemies. However, adults do start wars and end up in killing one another, as the novel mentions that there are wars going on outside the island. Laws and orders fail to oblique human beings when they are in the nature, and what the children do only resembles the adults. Jack and the hunters paint their faces when going for hunt, similar to the war paints soldiers use to disguise themselves. With the paint as the mask, Jack releases his evil nature because he has already abandoned himself as an English schoolboy and chooses to be a barbarian.
Furthermore, laws and correct behaviors are learnt and taken up by people after their birth; therefore, they can be, of course, forgotten and abandoned. However, their evil nature and their instincts are innate and born with them, so they can never forget and abandon them. ‘Mortality us a matter of conditioning and memory, not something innate’ and ‘it may well fade as memory does.’ (Kinkead-Weekes, Mark and Ian Gregor: 31). Laws, of course do fail because they are created by human beings and they are not innate; they are just conditioning human beings.
Piggy and Simon are dead before the rescue, and more unfortunately, they are killed by the other boys. In the passage, “the fall through the air of his true, wise friend called Piggy” tells us how Piggy dies: hit by a great rock and falls into the sea. The death of Piggy means in another way, the fall of rationality before primitive and evil nature of human beings. In the novel, Piggy represents science and rationality; he thinks everything in a scientific and logical way and he believes that every problem can be solved by science. Ralph refers Piggy to his wise and true friend because Piggy is the one who accompanies him from the beginning until he died. Ralph sees Piggy as a wise person because of his rationality and logical thinking. However, what Piggy thinks is not always true because science fails to explain the behavior of human beings. Man is the leader of all living things because they have spirits and emotions. On the other hand, science is invented by people and it represents civilization, for example, the high technology, the medicine and the spacecraft. Piggy has a flaw in his character, he believes in what his auntie says and he always says about this to the other boys. The knowledge of rationality he has is from his auntie, an adult and he thinks himself as a ‘little adult’. He does not know that adults are savage and they do hurt and kill one another. Besides, what Piggy fails to understand is that human beings do misuse science. Wars, with the help of science, successfully murder thousands of people and destroy numerous cities. The bombs, the guns, the ships and tanks are all the products of science but are all misused by human beings. Once when talking about the beast, Piggy says, “I know there isn’t no fear”, “unless we get frightened of people” (p90). He means that what they are frightened of is human being around them because they will hurt the others. In his opinion, evil nature does exist in people’s hearts, but he cannot see his darkness inside him.
Similar to the death of Piggy, the death of Simon also represents the loss of spirituality and religious faith when confronting the human’s evil nature. He is the representative of religion and spiritual mind. He is the only one who realizes the religious associations of the ‘candle bushes’ and ‘candle buds’ (p28). He also realizes that human beings are evil in nature. Simon is beaten to dead by the boys because they mistake him as the beast. His death gives us the idea that even the faith on religion is defeated by fear. Human beings are afraid of everything unknown and mysterious, and with fear, people become savage like the boys. When confronting the evil nature, the spirituality and religious faith in human beings lose. Without the spirituality, human beings resemble the animals that live by their own instincts.
Ralph actually weeps for all human beings because he finally realizes that human is evil by nature. ‘It is Ralph who is “grown-up”, but he shows his adulthood by weeping.’ (Kinkead-Weekes, Mark and Ian Gregor: p63). The main theme of this novel, human beings are evil by nature develops from the beginning and concludes with the epiphany of Ralph. He knows that human beings, even children are no longer innocence and rationality fails in binding human beings. Ralph is not rescued by the navy officer, but he is actually taken to the world of more terrible wars. He cannot be saved by adults because adults, too do not realize that there are ‘darkness’ in their hearts that cannot be conditioned or bound.
Bibliography
Cox, C B, “On Lord of the Flies” (1960), in William Golding: A Casebook, edited by Norman Page. London: Macmillan, 1985, pp 121.
Delbaere-Garant, Jeanne, “Rhythm and Expansion in Lord of the Flies”, in William Golding: Some Critical Considerations, edited by Jack I Biles & Robert O Evans. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1978, pp 84.
Kinkead-Weekes, Mark and Ian Gregor, “Lord of the Flies”, in William Golding: A Critical Study. London: Faber & Faber, revised edition 1984, pp 21, 24, 31, 63.
