LORD OF THE FLIES
In the midst of a
raging war, a plane evacuating a group of schoolboys from Britain is shot down
over a deserted tropical island. Two of the boys, Ralph and Piggy, discover a
conch shell on the beach, and Piggy realizes it could be used as a horn to
summon the other boys. Once assembled, the boys set about electing a leader and
devising a way to be rescued. They choose Ralph as their leader, and Ralph
appoints another boy, Jack, to be in charge of the boys who will hunt food for
the entire group.
Ralph, Jack, and
another boy, Simon, set off on an expedition to explore the island. When they
return, Ralph declares that they must light a signal fire to attract the
attention of passing ships. The boys succeed in igniting some dead wood by
focusing sunlight through the lenses of Piggy’s eyeglasses. However, the boys
pay more attention to playing than to monitoring the fire, and the flames
quickly engulf the forest. A large swath of dead wood burns out of control, and
one of the youngest boys in the group disappears, presumably having burned to
death.
At first, the boys
enjoy their life without grown-ups and spend much of their time splashing in
the water and playing games. Ralph, however, complains that they should be
maintaining the signal fire and building huts for shelter. The hunters fail in
their attempt to catch a wild pig, but their leader, Jack, becomes increasingly
preoccupied with the act of hunting.
When a ship passes by on
the horizon one day, Ralph and Piggy notice, to their horror, that the signal fire—which had been the hunters’ responsibility to maintain—has burned out.
Furious, Ralph accosts Jack, but the hunter has just returned with his first kill, and all the
hunters seem gripped with a strange frenzy, reenacting the chase in a kind of wild dance.
Piggy criticizes Jack, who hits Piggy across the face. Ralph blows the conch shell and
reprimands the boys in a speech intended to restore order. At the meeting, it quickly
becomes clear that some of the boys have started to become afraid. The littlest boys,known
as “littluns,” have been troubled by nightmares from the beginning, and more and more boys now believe that there is some sort of beast or monster lurking on the island. The older boys try to convince the others at the meeting to think rationally, asking where such a monster could possibly hide during the daytime. One of the littluns suggests that it hides in the sea—a proposition that terrifies the entire group.
Not long after the
meeting, some military planes engage in a battle high above the island. The
boys, asleep below, do not notice the flashing lights and explosions in the
clouds. A parachutist drifts to earth on the signal-fire mountain, dead. Sam
and Eric, the twins responsible for watching the fire at night, are asleep and
do not see the parachutist land. When the twins wake up, they see the enormous
silhouette of his parachute and hear the strange flapping noises it makes.
Thinking the island beast is at hand, they rush back to the camp in terror and
report that the beast has attacked them.
The boys organize a
hunting expedition to search for the monster. Jack and Ralph, who are
increasingly at odds, travel up the mountain. They see the silhouette of the
parachute from a distance and think that it looks like a huge, deformed ape.
The group holds a meeting at which Jack and Ralph tell the others of the
sighting. Jack says that Ralph is a coward and that he should be removed from
office, but the other boys refuse to vote Ralph out of power. Jack angrily runs
away down the beach, calling all the hunters to join him. Ralph rallies the
remaining boys to build a new signal fire, this time on the beach rather than
on the mountain. They obey, but before they have finished the task, most of
them have slipped away to join Jack.
Jack declares himself
the leader of the new tribe of hunters and organizes a hunt and a violent,
ritual slaughter of a sow to solemnize the occasion. The hunters then
decapitate the sow and place its head on a sharpened stake in the jungle as an
offering to the beast. Later, encountering the bloody, fly-covered head, Simon
has a terrible vision, during which it seems to him that the head is speaking.
The voice, which he imagines as belonging to the Lord of the Flies, says that
Simon will never escape him, for he exists within all men. Simon faints. When
he wakes up, he goes to the mountain, where he sees the dead parachutist.
Understanding then that the beast does not exist externally but rather within
each individual boy, Simon travels to the beach to tell the others what he has
seen. But the others are in the midst of a chaotic revelry—even Ralph and Piggy
have joined Jack’s feast—and when they see Simon’s shadowy figure emerge from
the jungle, they fall upon him and kill him with their bare hands and teeth.
The following morning,
Ralph and Piggy discuss what they have done. Jack’s hunters attack them and
their few followers and steal Piggy’s glasses in the process. Ralph’s group travels to
Jack’s stronghold in an attempt to make Jack see reason, but Jack orders Sam
and Eric tied up and fights with Ralph. In the ensuing battle, one boy, Roger,
rolls a boulder down the mountain, killing Piggy and shattering the conch
shell. Ralph barely manages to escape a torrent of spears.
Ralph hides for the
rest of the night and the following day, while the others hunt him like an
animal. Jack has the other boys ignite the forest in order to smoke Ralph out
of his hiding place. Ralph stays in the forest, where he discovers and destroys
the sow’s head, but eventually, he is forced out onto the beach, where he knows
the other boys will soon arrive to kill him. Ralph collapses in exhaustion, but
when he looks up, he sees a British naval officer standing over him. The
officer’s ship noticed the fire raging in the jungle. The other boys reach the
beach and stop in their tracks at the sight of the officer. Amazed at the
spectacle of this group of bloodthirsty, savage children, the officer asks
Ralph to explain. Ralph is overwhelmed by the knowledge that he is safe but,
thinking about what has happened on the island, he begins to weep. The other
boys begin to sob as well. The officer turns his back so that the boys may
regain their composure.
