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Fiction

Notes perceived conflict by acting destructively towards animals and plant life, Ralph responds by
retreating from the natural world. He does not participate in hunting or in Simon’s excursions
to the deep wilderness of the forest; rather, he stays on the beach, the most humanized part
of the island. As Jack’s hunting expresses his violent nature to the other boys and to the
reader, Ralph’s desire to stay separate from the natural world emphasizes both his reluctance
to tempt danger and his affinity for civilization.

27.1.5 Dehumanization of Relationships

In Lord of the Flies, one of the effects of the boys’ descent into savagery is their increasing
inability to recognize each other’s humanity. Throughout the novel, Golding uses imagery to
imply that the boys are no longer able to distinguish between themselves and the pigs they
are hunting and killing for food and sport. In Chapter Four, after the first successful pig hunt,
the hunters re-enact the hunt in a ritual dance, using Maurice as a stand-in for the doomed
pig. This episode is only a dramatization, but as the boys’ collective impulse towards complete
savagery grows stronger, the parallels between human and animal intensify. In Chapter Seven,
as several of the boys are hunting the beast, they repeat the ritual with Robert as a stand-in
for the pig; this time, however, they get consumed by a kind of “frenzy” and come close to
actually killing him. In the same scene, Jack jokes that if they do not kill a pig next time, they
can kill a littlun in its place. The repeated substitution of boy for pig in the childrens’ ritual
games, and in their conversation, calls attention to the consequences of their self-gratifying
behavior: concerned only with their own base desires, the boys have become unable to see
each other as anything more than objects subject to their individual wills. The more pigs the
boys kill, the easier it becomes for them to harm and kill each other. Mistreating the pigs
facilitates this process of dehumanization.

The early episodes in which boys are substituted for pigs, either verbally or in the hunting
dance, also foreshadow the tragic events of the novel’s later chapters, notably the murders of
Simon and Piggy and the attempt on Ralph’s life. Simon, a character who from the outset of
the novel is associated with the natural landscape he has an affinity for, is murdered when the
other children mistake him for “the beast”-a mythical inhuman creature that serves as an
outlet for the children’s fear and sadness. Piggy’s name links him symbolically to the wild
pigs on the island, the immediate target for Jack’s violent impulses; from the outset, when the
other boys refuse to call him anything but “Piggy,” Golding establishes the character as one
whose humanity is, in the eyes of the other boys, ambiguous. The murders of Simon and Piggy
demonstrate the boys’ complete descent into savagery. Both literally (Simon) and symbolically
(Piggy), the boys have become indistinguishable from the animals that they stalk and kill.

27.1.6 The Loss of Innocence

At the end of Lord of the Flies, Ralph weeps “for the end of innocence,” a lament that retroactively
makes explicit one of the novel’s major concerns, namely, the loss of innocence. When the boys
are first deserted on the island, they behave like children, alternating between enjoying their
freedom and expressing profound homesickness and fear. By the end of the novel, however,
they mirror the warlike behavior of the adults of the Home Counties: they attack, torture, and
even murder one another without hesitation or regret. The loss of the boys’ innocence on the
island runs parallel to, and informs their descent into savagery, and it recalls the Bible’s
narrative of the Fall of Man from paradise.
Accordingly, the island is coded in the early chapters as a kind of paradise, with idyllic
scenery, fresh fruit, and glorious weather. Yet, as in the Biblical Eden, the temptation toward
corruption is present: the younger boys fear a “snake-thing.” The “snake-thing” is the earliest

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