“The toy of voting was almost as pleasing as the conch.”
The boys from the choir automatically vote for Jack, but everybody else votes for Ralph as he has the conch, the symbol of power and authority at the beginning of the novel. Ralph shows what a good leader he is when he offers Jack the leadership of the choir.
“The choir belongs to you, of course. They could be the army, or hunters.”
All through out the novel Jack continuously tries to expand his leadership. Jack takes on the choir as hunters.
The hunting is one aspect of the novel where the reader can clearly see the downfall within the standards and morals of the boys. The first time that Jack and his army go off hunting, they find a pig, but Jack cannot kill it. He has a good chance of killing the pig, but he does not. Jack claims that he was “choosing a place” and just missed the pig, but everybody else knew that it was because of the “Unbearable blood.” The blood is too much for the boys, killing is bad enough but the blood is too horrific. Jack is partly embarrassed that he did not kill the pig, he felt smaller now, as he could not bring himself to kill the pig. The next time there is a hunt it is just Jack on his own and he fails to catch anything.
Jack’s image has changed a lot since the beginning of the novel.
“Except for tattered shorts held up by a knife-belt he was naked.”
Jack has gone from being one of the smartest boys to half naked and worn. The rest of the hunters all change too. Jack has made face paints out of clay and it compels the other boys to join him, and they all paint their faces. Now they have masks to hide behind, metaphorically and literally. The hunting starts to become more horrific now. This time when the boys go hunting they catch a pig, and make their way back to camp, chanting.
“Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood.”
Jack and the boys are really excited at what they have done, everybody is eager to tell what happened to the others. Its seems that they have lost all their inhibitions, but the reader knows this is not so as Jack notices blood on his hands and feels wrong.
“ He noticed blood on his hands and grimaced distastefully.”
Jack looks for something to wipe his hands on as he cannot bear the blood on them. This time Jack does not seem so bothered by the fact that the pig bled. He describes it to Ralph excitedly. When Ralph tells Jack that Jack had let the fire go out and there had been a ship, Jack simply says “ you should have seen the blood!” Jack is getting distracted from being rescued. His hunting is more important to him. Jack later decided to break away from the group of boys and says that he does not need Ralph. The next killing is one of the worst, killing the mother pig who is feeding her young; In “deep maternal bliss.” She is ferociously killed in a beautiful clearing. Jack giggles as he kills her and flicks the blood on his fingers. The blood no longer bothers him. He is turning totally against they way he has been conditioned to live. Jack puts the pig head on a pole, creating some of the worst imagery in the novel.
The next killing that takes place is of Simon. The boys are starting to dance, their ritual. Dancing and chanting. Rhythmic chanting. There is lightening and Piggy and Ralph have given in and gone to join Jack and his tribe, they are scared of the storm and want the protection of being with the others. Whilst they are chanting something crawls out of the bushes and the tribe of now savages starts to chant even louder, they believe it the beast, they kill it. Stabbing it with spears. It is in fact Simon who had seen that there is no beast and has come to try and save them, but while he is trying to save them, the other boys are killing him. It seems that Simon is the only boy who doesn’t let his morals drop whilst he is alive on the island.
Stone throwing on the island is the cause of another death amongst the boys. Stone throwing starts off in a small way at the beginning of the play with Roger throwing stones at one of the little boys; Henry. But Roger throws to miss, the stones land in a circle around Henry. The circle symbolises they way that Roger has been conditioned by civilisation. The circle represents his parents, the police, his school, and the law. Roger doesn’t want to break the circle just as there are no adults. Towards the end of the book Ralph kicks a stone into the water by the entrance to castle rock.
“The sea sucked down revealing a red, weedy square forty feet beneath Ralph’s left arm.”
This is ironic as this is where Piggy meets his death. Roger pushes a large boulder off of the top of castle rock that comes crashing down and sends Piggy flying over the edge. Piggy lands the same way as the stone and his head is split open, and his arms and legs twitched “ a bit like a pigs after it had been killed.“
Jack has no remorse for what he has done, he simply makes an example of Piggy saying that that’s what you’ll get.
Jack treats Ralph like and animal and he is hunted down like a pig. Ralph tries to think like a pig as he tries to hide from Jack and his tribe.
“He wondered if a pig would agree.”
Jack tries to smoke Ralph out of the forest like an animal. Jack has no sense of humanity; all he is interested in is his tribe and everybody working for him.
The leaders change throughout the novel. As people become more bored with the rules and trying to keep order they take to Jack’s way of ruling. Ralph, Piggy and the conch, will offer them the best chance of survival, but Jack offers them fun, and excitement, like in books they have read. Jack just says no to Ralph’s rules and thw whole of the civilisation breaks down. Jack rules with as a dictator, he is idolised by the others as though he is above everybody else. At the beginning of the novel every one is working with pride, building huts, and happy with themselves and how they are getting on. At the end of the play, Jack is chosing who works, who plays, he has full control over they boys. The conch loses all value, and is smashed along with Piggy. When the conch breaks it is like the whole of the civilisation has broken.
Ralph, Piggy, Sam and Eric do try hard to keeps the civilisation going even when it is just them. The brush their hair and try to dress nicely, as a “Liberation to savagery.” But Ralph’s mind deteriorates at the same rate his appearance does, and no matter what he does he cannot hold on to it. Just as Percivil cannot remember his name when they are rescued. At the beginning of the novel Percivil, a small boy, can recite his name, address, and telephone number, but now at the end even his name surpasses him. The appearance of the boys goes from being very smart in uniform, to mostly naked, painted faces, long scruffy hair, and dirty skin. The boys standards seem to deteriorate with their appearance.
One can assume that the main reason Golding used British school boys is that he was himself British. He had attended the sort of schools that these boys were attending, and he was a schoolmaster in the British system. He had been through this system that was supposed to produce civilized young men, and he was now part of it, and both perspectives gave him lots of chances to observe just how wild and uncivilized these boys were, and just how close to the surface their basic savage nature could be found.
In a general sense, the British were supposed to be civilized, and had for many decades thought of themselves as carrying civilization with them as they went into foreign lands and ran their empire. The book is an extended commentary on this ideal.
For more on Golding's background, see the enotes biography on him (available via the link below).
What Is William Golding Telling Us About Civilisation in ‘Lord Of The Flies’?
What William Golding is telling us about civilisation is that without rules and organisation, civilisation would not be able to exist and that there is a beast in everyone, it is just a question of whether it can be controlled. His point is shown through the actions of boys on the island, through their transformation from being normal school boys to a murderous mob of savages. At the start of the novel, a group of schoolboys have crash-landed on a deserted island. Golding has experimented with boys to see how they would react without adults. He has placed them on an uninhabited island with food and water. After they have crash-landed, two characters emerge- Ralph and Piggy. Ralph is excited by the idea that there are no adults on the island so he can have fun;
‘In the middle of the scar he stood on his head and grinned at the reversed fat boy. “No grown-ups!”
Conversely, Piggy is worried that there are no grown ups on the island. Piggy finds the conch and gives it to Ralph and tells him to blow on it. After Ralph has blown on it, all the other boys follow the sound of the conch and gather around Ralph and a democratic election takes place where Jack and Ralph were the candidates. Ralph gets elected, as Ralph was the one who blew the conch. During the election the reader is introduced to Jack. Jack is a character who loves to be in command and control of anything. Ralph’s main objective after the election is to make a fire and try to keep it alights until someone spots it to save them. He creates rules to ensure that order is kept on the island. By creating these rules, Ralph has formed a new civilisation within the island for the boys. Therefore creating a civilisation or even a hierarchical structure in the island depicting the different motives and missions of each role in civilisation and who wins and who loses. Without the rules that Ralph has made, the boys would be in anarchy and become savages from the beginning. This book is also an attempt to trace the faults of civilisation back to the defects of human nature.
During the novel, a beast haunts the boy’s dreams. It begins when a ‘littlun’, misinterprets a snake for a beast. No one believed the ‘littlun’ at first, but as the story progressed they started to fear the beast. They had themselves to blame for this beast, as it was they that were conjuring up the fear of the so-called beast. This beast is further misinterpreted as a dead parachutist. The beast is within the boys. This causes the fear that instigates a lot of the boys’ actions. But Jack manipulates the boy’s feelings and tells them that if there were a beast, then he would hunt it down. By saying this the boys felt protected and hence started to prefer to fight against the unknown beast rather than believe if there was or wasn’t a beast;
‘“Bollocks to the rules! We’re strong- we hunt. If there’s a beast, we’ll hunt it down! We’ll close in and beat and beat and beat-!”’
This shows that Jack had taken the first step into becoming a savage. By saying “Bollocks to the rules”, he has said that he has no regards to the rules. He manipulated the others’ minds so he could be elected chief; gaining trust by saying he is guarding them from the beast. However, there isn’t a beast on the island hence they cannot hunt it down, this is what Simon discovers further on. Simon had a hallucination in where he meets head-on with a pig’s head on a stick covered with flies, in front of a derelict cave. The pig’s head was a gift given by Jack, to the beast. The pig’s head, the Lord of the Flies, says to Simon in his hallucination that there is no beast that can be hunted, because the beast is a part of everyone;
‘“Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!...You knew didn’t you? I’m part of you?”’
This shows that the beast is a part of everyone. A part of everyone’s fears and prejudices. It is just a matter of whether it can be controlled. Jack’s feelings towards the beast is exposed the most, because he is the most savage. The character that can control his feelings towards the beast the most is Piggy, probably because he is weak and frightened and doesn’t like the idea of savagery, but maybe Piggy also is civilised and obeys the rules, as Simon and Ralph do. These three characters can control their beast the most, which Golding portrays as them being the most civilised, a contrast from the rest of the boys mainly Jack and Roger. However, Piggy and Ralph’s give in to their fear of the beasts as they take part in the killing of Simon. Simon was rushing towards the other of the boys so he could tell them that the Beast was within them and that it represents their fear, darker, more savage side of basic human behaviour. While this is happening, everyone else is joining in a dance in which a boy, Roger, is a pig and the rest are killing him. This signifies their energy and readiness as if preparing for the moment any time soon. They are completely definite in their minds that there is a beast hence the preparations. Piggy and Ralph eventually join in with the savage dance;
‘Piggy and Ralph under the threat of the sky, found themselves eager to take a place in this demented but partly secure society.’
This shows that because there is a storm coming, something bad is going to happen. Golding is giving a clue or a hint to the reader of what is going to happen next. Ralph and Piggy eventually joins in with the savage dance, where they could feel safe and protected alongside the rest of the numerous adrenaline pumped boys. Even though they didn’t want to be part of the dance at first, their savagery got the better of them when they took part in the killing/murder of Simon. During the killing there was a chant;
‘“Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!”’
Simon was rushing to the boys; to tell them about the beats, however was misinterpreted as the beast itself and the boys savagery was released. Simon was mistaken for the beast and was attacked and killed;
‘The sticks fell…Only the beast lay still’.
Ralph finds out about Simon’s undelivered message, about the Beast. The fact that the beast is a figment of the boys imagination, that it is all within them, and represents the darker, more savage side of human nature;
‘Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart’.
Ralph and Piggy talked about Simon’s death the following morning. Ralph tells Piggy he feels guilty while Piggy wants to erase the thought of his savagery from his mind completely. This shows that they both regret their savage actions and wish it had never happened, they resembled perpetrators of manslaughter. Killing someone without intention. They are not truly savage, but the numbers of the adrenaline pumped boys influenced them into the frenzy killing by the idea of safety.
Nevertheless, near the end of the novel, Ralph’s mind is constantly being disturbed by an uncontrollable feeling, which stops him from thinking straight and makes gives him more primitive behaviours on the island;
‘He paused lamely as the curtain flickered in his brain.’
This shows that Ralph is starting to become savage, because he cannot think efficiently and is becoming more primitive. This may be as he is becoming tempted to become a savage because of the breakdown of democratic civilisation in the boys. His curtain is his mind, if the curtain is open Ralph can control himself, it is like the first step for his inner beast to be free and have taken over his actions, so when the curtain shuts, his beast takes over.
Everyone on the island has an inner beast; it is just a question of whether it can be controlled. The beast can be controlled by organisation and rules, or the goodness of heart. Jack creates a tribal group of his own, who have no rules and organisation and most of all there is no goodness he spends his time killing and hunting which shows savage evilness. Ralph’s group have rules and organisation. Jack’s tribe become savage and kill and torture members of Ralph’s group. Jack’s tribe have all awoken their inner beasts, while Ralph’s group can control theirs. The beast represents the darker, more savage side of human nature, and with rules and organisation, this beast can be controlled. Piggy is Ralph’s brain, adviser, trust and intellect. Both Ralph and Piggy represent order and democracy. Jack is the spark of wilderness that burns hot and close to the surface, who later clashes with Ralph. From the very beginning Jack has emotions of anger and savagery. Simon has the most positive outlook out of all of the characters and is depicted as a “Christ figure.” He is good and pure and insists that they will be rescued.
At the beginning of the novel, Piggy finds a conch. He gives it to Ralph to blow on. This conch gathers the boy’s scattered around the deserted island together, because Ralph gathered everyone together he is elected chief. He creates rules to ensure order and civilisation is kept. His rules included that if anyone wishes to speak, to discuss issues, they should be holding the conch;
‘“I’ll give the conch to the next person to speak. He can hold it when he’s speaking.”’
This shows that the conch represents order and democracy. Power to the people. By implementing rules and laws, Ralph has created a new civilisation or parliament. Just as a flag is a representation of a particular country, the conch is a representation of their civilisation, in which rules and organisation are essential. Also, Ralph does not call them as “next boy”, but addresses them as “next person”, which means that he treats the boys as mature adults and not immature children. This shows that the boys are mature enough to run a community.
As the time on the island increases, the conch is used less and less. This is because savagery is getting declared more and more. There is an unbalance between the two. The savagery is weighting heavier against democracy and goodness in civilisation. As the other boys become savage, Ralph, Piggy and Simon obey the rules and don’t become as savage as the others. However Ralph was ever nearing to become brutal on a number of occasions when he forgets that they need to be rescued of the island.
The island then becomes partitioned to two sections. Where the group of boys split up into Jack’s savage tribe and Ralph’s civilised community. Ralph, Piggy, Sam and Eric go to Jack’s tribe to get Piggy’s glasses back, which was stolen to make a fire. The littluns are forgotten and left alone, which shows that order on the island has changed to anarchy. Piggy in Ralphs’s group takes the conch with them as a sign of democracy and order, and how things should be. Piggy feels that the conch is the only power he has over Jack:
‘“You let me carry the conch, Ralph. I’ll show him the one thing he hasn’t got.”’
This shows that Jack’s tribe do not have order or civility, because they do not possess the conch. When they get there, Ralph and Jack engage in a fight. Then Roger, from the top of Castle Rock, levers a huge boulder onto Piggy, which kills him and destroys the conch.
‘…the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.’
His painful death and the overthrowing of the “conch” represented the disappearance of some of the remains of democracy. When Sam’n’Eric are taken under Jack's control, Ralph is the only one left with the fading sense of democracy and goodness against evil. With the conch gone, order and civility also fades away.
The conch represents order and goodness and when it is destroyed, all order and goodness on the island is destroyed with it. It is replaced by savagery, which consumes the entire island from that point. It is like a contagious disease.
At the beginning of the novel, the meetings are well controlled, civilised meetings with everyone obeying the rules that only Ralph, the Chief, could interrupt the others when they spoke and the only way for the others to speak was with the conch in their hands. However, as the novel progresses, the meeting become more and more chaotic and out of control as everyone apart from Piggy speak without the conch and interrupts others. This is because there is less respect and less order for each other and more savagery tales place. A particular democratic meetings of Ralph’s falls apart with the mention of the beast;
‘The careful plan of this assembly had broken down.’
The meetings get more and more out of control as the rules get broken on a more regular basis. This signals the end of order and respect. Civilised discussions are replaced by savage arguments. Even Ralph forgets why some of the meetings had taken place, because his uncontrollable curtain tempts him to become more and more primitive. Piggy constantly reminds him that they need to be rescued. In another meeting, Jack splits apart from the group to form his own tribe:
‘“I’m not going to be part of Ralph’s lot-”’
This signals the end of one unified group, and the beginning of two separated ones- Ralph’s civilised society and Jack’s savage tribe.
In conclusion, Golding is telling us that without rules and organisation, civilisation among humans cannot survive and that there is a beast in everyone, it is just a question if it can be controlled. Golding may have wrote this book in the light of events during his time such as the civil war where people believed that world war three would break out. This beast aka the war can be controlled by rules and organisation. It represents savagery and the darkness of human nature; this is all triggered by fear. The conch and the assemblies represent democracy and order, and as the conch is mentioned less and less and the democratic assemblies get more and more out of control, the beast within everyone arouses more and more often from its sleep. At the end two groups are formed- the savage group of Jack’s and the civilised one of Ralph’s. Jack’s group are more of a tribe than a civilisation, because rules and organisation mean nothing to them as they act primitive and carry out savage killings. The fall of rules/laws and organisation also means the rise of the boys inner beasts. Golding is trying to show that men must have rules in order to control his or her savage or dark side. He is trying to tell us that you have to have rules; otherwise there will be chaos. Also that human must have rules to be able to stay alive. Even if some people do not like them they must still obey them. Civilisation must have rules it is there to keep order and respect for each other in place. One of the most obvious point Golding is trying to tell us about Civilisation on the Island is that society holds everyone together, and without these conditions, our ideals, values, and the basics of right and wrong are lost. Golding is also trying to tell us that morals come from our surroundings and the people around us, and if there is no civilisation around us, men will lose such values. William Golding shows us that the darkness of man’s heart can be controlled by rules and organisation. Adults are in charge of our world because they are mature enough to have rules and organisation. It also demonstrates what will happen in a world without rules.
William Golding, one can see how children react to certain situations.
Children, when given the opportunity, would choose to play and have fun
rather than to do boring, hard work. Also, when children have no other
adults to look up to they turn to other children for leadership. Finally,
children stray towards savagery when they are without adult authority.
Therefore, Golding succeeds in effectively portraying the interests and
attitudes of young children in this novel.
When children are given the opportunity, they would rather envelop
themselves in pleasure and play than in the stresses of work. The boys
show enmity towards building the shelters, even though this work is
important, to engage in trivial activities. Af ter one of the shelters
collapses while only Simon and Ralph are building it, Ralph clamours, "All
day I've been working with Simon. No one else. They're off bathing or
eating, or playing." (55). Ralph and Simon, though only children, are
more mature a nd adult like and stray to work on the shelters, while the
other children aimlessly run off and play. The other boys avidly choose
to play, eat, etc. than to continue to work with Ralph which is very
boring and uninteresting. The boys act typically of m ost children their
age by being more interested in having fun than working. Secondly, all
the boys leave Ralph's hard-working group to join Jack's group who just
want to have fun. The day after the death of Simon when Piggy ! and Ralph
are bathing, Piggy points beyond the platform and says, "That's where
they're gone. Jack's party. Just for some meat. And for hunting and for
pretending to be a tribe and putting on war-paint."(163). Piggy realizes
exactly why the boys have gone to Jack's, which would be for fun and
excitement. The need to play and have fun in Jack's group, even though
the boys risk the tribe's brutality and the chance of not being rescued,
outweighs doing work with Ralph's group which increase their chance s of
being rescued. Young children need to satisfy their amusement by playing
games instead of doing work. In conclusion, children are more interested
in playing and having fun than doing unexciting labor.
When children are without adults to look to for leadership, they look for
an adult-like person for leadership. At the beginning of the novel, when
the boys first realize they are all alone, they turn to Ralph for
leadership. After Ralph calls the first meeting, Golding writes, "There
was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was his
size, and attractive appearance, and most obscurely, yet most powerfully,
there was the conch. The being that had sat waiting for them." (24). The
b oys are drawn to Ralph because of his physical characteristics and
because he had blown the conch. The fact that there are no adults has
caused the boys to be attracted to Ralph as a leader. The physical
characteristics of Ralph remind the boys of their
parents or other adult authority figures they may have had in their old
lives back home. There is also the conch that Ralph holds which may
remind the boys of a school bell or a teacher's whistle. Finally, at the
end of the novel, the boys turn to Jack to satisfy their need for some much-needed
leadership. When the boys are feasting on the meat of a freshly killed
sow, the narrator says:
Jack spoke 'Give me a drink.' Henry brought him a shell and he drank.
Power lay in the blown swell of his forearms; authority sat on his
shoulder and chattered in his ear like an ape. 'All sit down.' The boys
ranged themselves in rows on the grass before him. (165)
Jack now has full authority over the other boys. The boys look to Jack for
his daunting leadership which intimidates them. Jack is very forceful and
his ways most likely remind the boys of authoritative figures in their
pastwho may have strapped, beaten or used other forms of violence when
disciplining the children. Therefore, the children when left without
adult authority figures turn to others who can replace that adult
authority figure.
In addition to seeking adult-like authority figures, children lose
their innocence and stray towards savagery when not around adult
authority. When the boys have been on the island for a short time, they
start to show more violence, but when they realiz e what they have done
they become contrite, embarrassed by their actions. After Maurice
destroys Percival's sandcastle and some sand gets in Percival's eye, the
narrator writes:
Percival began to whimper with an eyeful of sand and Maurice hurried
away. In his other life Maurice had received chastisement for filling a
younger eye with sand. Now, though there was no parent to let fall a
heavy hand, Maurice still felt unease of wrongdoing. (65)
Maurice has hurt Percival but feels bad about it because in his past life
he would have been punished for it. Without adults, Maurice is turning
towards barbarianism but has not been away from the order and discipline
of his previous life to be considere d a savage. Children misbehave when
not around adults because there is no one to discipline or punish them.
Yet, for a brief time after the children have been away from adults, the
children will feel remorseful. Also, after the boys have been absent fr
om structured discipline, they become blatant savages and retain
absolutely no innocence. When Piggy and Ralph visit Castle Rock to get
back Piggy's glasses, Golding says: Roger, with a sense of delirious
abandonment, leaned all his weight on the lever. The rock struck Piggy.
Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across that square across
that square red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff came out and
turned red. (200)
Without apprehension, Roger performs the horrible and violent act of
killing Piggy. Roger has now been without adults to discipline him for
quite a long time and his actions have become more intensely brutal. The
boys have been unpunished for so long tha t they continually become more
and more violent and thus, have made the final step to becoming all out
savages. Typically, children are reprimanded for their misbehavior and as
they mature, what is right and what is wrong becomes embedded in their
brains to the point where they almost never stray towards uncivilized behaviour.
Clearly children can quickly forget what is right and what is wrong,
especially when being away from adults for an extended period of time,
often resulting in a loss of innocence.
Lastly, at the end of the novel when around the naval officer arrives,
the boys return to their old ways of being orderly and civilized. When
Ralph is chased onto the beach by Jack's tribe and finds the naval
officer, the na! rrator says, "A semi-circle of little boys, their bodies
streaked with coloured clay, sharp sticks in their hands, were standing on
the beach making no noise at all." (221). The previously wild savages are
now quiet little boys in an orderly semi-circle.
With the arrival of an adult authority figure from the outside world,
the boys are beginning to return to the decorum of their innocent, more
childlike past. The boys are in a semi-circle instead of in a pack of
savages, they are coloured with clay ins tead of gaudy war-paint, they are
holding sticks instead of spears and they are absolutely as quiet as they
would have been around adults in their previous lives. Children are
usually more ordered, disciplined and civilized under adult supervision
just a s the boys are the instant they see the naval officer. To
summarize, when not around adult order, discipline and punishment,
children become very much like savages and lose most of their innocence.
In conclusion, in the novel The Lord of the Flies, Golding
succeeds in showing the actions, decisions and thinking of young children.
Children would choose to play and have fun rather than work and consequently. When
children need to look for leadership and there are no adults around to
provide this, children look for another child who has adult-like qualities
for leadership. Children are disobedient, violent and lose their
innocence when there are no adults to supervise them. A child's life is a
long and winding road in which they can be sidetracked quite easily.
