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Unit 25: William Golding — Lord of the Flies: Detailed Study of Text-I

believes that he sees smoke along the horizon coming from a ship, but there is not enough Notes
smoke from the mountain to signal it. Ralph starts to run to the up the mountain, but he is
too late. Their signal fire is dead. Ralph screams for the ship to come back, but it passes
without seeing them. Frustrated and sad, Ralph places the blame on the hunters, whose job
it was to tend the fire.
From the forest, Jack and the hunters return covered in paint and humming a bizarre war
chant. Ralph sees that the hunt has finally been successful: they are carrying a dead pig on a
stick. Nevertheless, Ralph admonishes them for letting the fire go out. Jack, however, is overjoyed
by the kill and ignores Ralph. Piggy begins to cry at their lost opportunity, and he also blames
Jack. The two argue, and finally Jack punches Piggy in the stomach. Piggy’s glasses fly off, and
one of the lenses breaks on the rocks. Jack eventually does apologize about the fire, but Ralph
resents Jack’s misbehavior. Jack considers not letting Piggy have any meat, but he orders
everyone to eat. Maurice pretends to be a pig, and the hunters circle around him, dancing and
singing, “Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Bash her in.” Ralph vows to call an assembly.

Analysis
Golding begins the chapter by describing a sense of order among the boys on the island, and
he concludes it by describing the order’s disintegration. Even the smallest boys appear to have
accepted their fate on the island, and they have developed strategies, such as the building of
sand castles, to minimize and contain their anguish. The key to the initial tranquility on the
island is the maintenance of customs from the society in which the boys were raised. Yet, as
the chapter’s opening passages imply, these customs are threatened by the natural forces at
work on the island. The regular schedule of work, play time, and meal time is impossible in
the volatile tropical atmosphere. That the boys do not know whether the movement of the
mid-afternoon sea is real or a “mirage” indicates how ill-adjusted to the island they still are.
We begin to focus on the boys’-particularly Jack’s-transgression of the ordered rules of their
invented society. Golding highlights how life on the island has begun to mirror human society,
with the boys organizing themselves into cliques according to age and placing these cliques
in a social hierarchy. The littluns have their own routines and separate themselves from the
older boys. The intricate sandcastles the littluns build on the shore represent their continued
respect for-even idealization of-human civilization, and their continuing presence at Ralph’s
meetings signals the littluns’ investment in ordered island life, even though they do not
contribute directly to the group’s survival.

Notes Golding employs the littluns as symbols for the weak members of society that a
successful democracy strives to protect.

The episode with Roger and Maurice kicking down the sandcastles thus signals the disintegration
of ordered life on the island, and it foreshadows the end of Ralph’s democratic plans. The
sandcastles are a miniature civilization on the shore. By destroying the sandcastles, Roger and
Maurice not only express an abusive power over the younger boys but indicate their increasing
disrespect for civilized order and human institutions. Still, Golding suggests, they have not
yet devolved into complete savagery. Maurice, remembering his mother’s discipline, feels
guilty about kicking sand into Percival’s eye, and Roger refrains from throwing a stone at
Henry. The implication is that the influences of human society are difficult to erase from the
human psyche; they remain internalized even in the absence of rules, and conscience retains
its hold. Whatever lessons the boys’ past had instilled in them prove critical to maintaining

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