Theme Flashcards
(15 cards)
“What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?”
Piggy says this to Ralph during one of their assemblies. Piggy is consistently in support of keeping a signal fire going, and concentrating on their rescue. He sees the boys’ potential for violence long before the others. Here, he pleads with his listeners to remember their civilization back home, while articulating a central question of the novel.
“Jack stood up as he said this, the bloodied knife in his hand. The two boys faced each other. There was the brilliant world of hunting, tactics, fierce exhilaration, skill; and there was the world of longing and baffled commonsense.”
Throughout the novel Golding suggests that the path to civilization is more difficult and less likely than the path to tyranny. Here, Jack and Ralph fight. Jack is described in terms of his adroitness, Ralph in terms of his shortcomings, and the ideals he represents are presented as less tangible or attractive.
“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 - !”
Jack shouts this to Piggy, who advocates against believing in the beast, and in maintaining the signal fire. Again, Golding shows that Jack’s pitch is simple and compelling, while Piggy’s and Ralph’s is mired in debate and indecision. By offering simple, brutal solutions and by playing off of the other boys’ fears, Jack positions himself as likely chief.
“’We’ve got to have special people for looking after the fire. Any day there may be a ship out there… and if we have a signal going they’ll come and take us off. And another thing. We ought to have more rules. Where the conch is, that’s a meeting. The same up here as down there.”
Ralph sets up his society with the express mission of looking to the future, and focusing on the boys’ safety, by way of shelter, and rescue. This need for rules, and constant decision-making, proves untenable for the boys, who gravitate toward authoritarianism throughout the novel.
“Maybe there is a beast… Maybe it’s only us.”
While the other boys are afraid of a sea monster or some winged creature, Simon meditates on the metaphysical nature of the beast, wondering if they should fear their own natures instead of some outside force. Simon predicts that there is a darkness lurking in the hearts of the boys on the island, and rejects the notion of a beast.
“Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!… You knew didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?”
The Lord of the Flies says this to Simon when he is isolated, in the woods. The Lord of the Flies confirms Simon’s theory about the beast, explaining that the darkness that is within human beings can’t be killed. Here, Golding uses dialogue to point to his larger allegory, to answer “why things are what they are.”
“His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.”
Jack relishes what he feels after a particularly satisfying hunt. Here, Golding makes a connection between Jack’s thrill of the hunt and his desire to commit violence. Even at the first assembly, Jack is obsessed with the idea of hunting, which, Golding suggests, betrays his desire to take life.
“Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood.”
Immediately after their first successful hunt, Jack’s hunters chant as a group, showing that they prefer to enact violence as a mob, rather than as individuals. Their chanting shows their cohesion, and their delight over killing becomes ritualistic.
“Simon was crying out something about a dead man on a hill… The sticks fell and the mouth of the new circle crunched and screamed. The beast was on its knees in the center, its arms folded over its face. It was crying out against the abominable noise, something about a body on the hill… At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore.”
This quote suggests otherwise moral beings will subject themselves to immorality for the purpose of joining a group. When Simon is murdered, the boys think that he is the beast, and enable each other to believe this fantasy. Again, they kill as a mob, nobody stepping in to disrupt the collective fantasy or prevent injustice.
“There had grown up tacitly among the biguns the opinion that Piggy was an outsider, not only by accent, which did not matter, but by fat, and ass-mar, and specs, and a certain disinclination for manual labor.”
If most of the boys are vulnerable to the attractions of being part of a group, Piggy is firmly independent. His lack of physical prowess and his tendency toward thoughtfulness make him a bad fit for mob mentality. His virtues–wisdom, patience, goodness–are not immediately apparent or attractive to the rest of the boys.
“Memory of the dance that none of them had attended shook all four boys convulsively.”
After Simon is killed, Piggy, Samneric, and Ralph, all struggle with what they saw. Only Ralph is able to correctly remember it as murder. The other boys pretend they didn’t see it, or that they weren’t there, or that it was an accident. This kind of willful ignorance and delusion enables mobs to behave brutally or immorally.
“… the mask was a thing on its own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness.”
In order for the boys to commit violence, they need to subjugate their individual morality, and senses of shame to the will of the group. Golding reflects the psychology of mob mentality here, showing that Jack uses his facepaint to silence the good in him, and enable him to be ruthless and shameless.
“So they had shifted camp then, away from the beast. As Simon thought this, he turned to the poor broken thing that sat stinking by his side. The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must reach the others as soon as possible.”
Simon discovers that what they thought was the beast is only a dead paratrooper. This beast is both “harmless and horrible,” which points to the fact that, while it is no fanged monster like the boys thought, it’s still a threat as a reminder of the instability and violence that exists in the world beyond the island.
“Didn’t you hear what the pilot said? About the atom bomb? They’re all dead.”
Golding places the action of his novel directly after a detonation of an atomic bomb. By doing this, he ties his story to real geopolitical problems, making his story a prediction of what future societies would look like after global war. The boys are unable to rebuild civilization, and fall quickly into savagery.
“And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.”
The novel ends with Ralph’s hopes for fairness and civility destroyed, as he realizes that what he experienced on the island betrayed something fundamental about the darkness inherit to all mankind. He rightly realizes that people like Piggy – individuals averse to violence, and prone to thoughtfulness – have no place in any future social order. This is why Ralph weeps: because what he saw on the island was a microcosm of the world at large.
