Lord of the Flies Main

Lord of the Flies

Main characters, setting, plot, exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution.

The four main characters

The main characters -- Ralph, Piggy, Jack and Simon -- play critically important roles in the novel, and each has a pivotal part in the plot and the exposition. Ralph is presented as the organized person, the athletic and productive person among the group. Ralph is a good-looking boy, better looking than the others and yet he is the quintessential average English boy. Ralph had pretty good spoken language skills, but when things get stressful, he can't always find the correct words to express what needs to be said. On pages 101-102, for example, Ralph was approaching the boys, who were assembled for one of their meetings; "…he went over the important points of his speech… he lost himself in a maze of thoughts that were rendered vague by his lack of words to express them." Early in the novel Ralph is incredulous at the barbaric behaviors of some of the boys, but later in the novel he gets swept away by the frenzied dancing related to the hunting of a boar and the killing of Simon.

Piggy makes the most dramatic impression on the reader because he appears to be totally unsuited for this adventure. He is overweight, he is nearsighted, needs his glasses to see, he can't swim at all and he is an asthmatic. Making things worse for Piggy is the fact that he is a mamma's boy and does his share of whining. However, ironically, he has some of the best strategies and indeed becomes the symbol of order and decorum (such as there was) on the island. It is Piggy, who gives s the conch shell meaning, and it is Piggy's glasses that gives the boys the technology to make fire, and fire is a symbol of their hope-for rescue and survival. It could be said that Piggy represents the rational and intellectual side of society.

Jack is the antagonist in the novel. He is good at hunting and wants to be a leader but his obsession for all-out power doesn't succeed. He turns into a wild and cruel person. Jack's passion for power often leaves little room for doing good things for the whole of the island community. When Jack and Ralph go head to head, it is usually Ralph that is on the defensive side of the conflict. Basically Ralph is depicted as heading a rational society of boys, and Jack is portrayed as leader of the more tribal, barbaric, and primitive sub-culture on the island.

Readers and scholars have viewed Simon as a kind of Christ-like personality. He generally exemplifies what is good about society, and he even presents a saintly demeanor that sets him apart spiritually from the rest. He is shy and sensitive, and cares about the well being of the community, the antithesis of Jack. Simon is very much linked to the natural world.

The setting

The novel's setting is very much in the literary tradition of Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss Family. A World War II airplane that is ferrying a group of English boys to safety from England (where an atomic war is being carried out against England by the "Reds") crashes during a terrible storm. The adults are lost but the boys manage to escape and find themselves in a tropical environment where there is a warm comfortable climate and lots of food, coconuts, bananas and other fruits.

The plot / exposition / rising action / climax / falling action / resolution

The plot and exposition: The boys get organized and make progress towards survival. They start with a kind of grown-up structure for their group, modeling it after government. They enact "laws," they put together plumbing facilities and other structures but those elements don't last very long as superstition and aggressive attitudes help to break down the system they thought they had set up. They fail at setting up shelters and they fail at keeping the fire burning and like young boys in any situation, they are fearful of the dark and of the night. In time the boys kill one of their members (Piggy) and they become wild uncivilized beasts. The rising action is when fear begins to set in, the boys abandon their earlier promise to be civil and orderly, and power struggles ensue between Ralph and Jack. The climax is when Simon discovers that there is no beast, but in fact the tension is due to the beast within each person. When he tries to explain that, he is savagely killed. Falling action: the boys abandon Ralph and Piggy and Ralph runs into a naval officer on the beach. The resolution is when the island's foliage is on fire, a naval vessel sees the smoke and rescues Ralph from being killed and in the process rescues all the boys and returns them to civilization.

TWO: (a) What causes the boys to transcend from innocents to barbarians?

Clearly, the boys become fearful of the unknown and they get involved in power struggles. Both those human elements are part of adult life even in civilized society. Fear can be a good thing, it can motivate humans to prepare for the worst, but for unsophisticated young boys, fear can be destructive. Nighttime brings fear to the boys, and they conjured up dark fantasies and they don't handle it well. "They suffered untold terrors in the dark and huddled together for comfort" (77).

Power struggles also become a problem for the group. Along with the struggle for power between Jack and Ralph the toxic ingredients of jealousy, anger, and irrational behavior also played roles. As an example of how every one of the boys felt he had to have some kind of control (for at least a sense of power) is Henry. While he was not one of the main characters but one of the "littluns" found his own little sense of power playing in the tide pools. He "tried to control the motions of the scavengers…he became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things… he talked to them, urging them, ordering them" (79-80).

TWO: (B) Are humans born evil or do they learn evil?

This is a philosophical question that cannot be answered simply through an examination of this novel. However, the novel puts forward the notion that all humans are susceptible to evil, and put in the right situation they can become evil. The boys in the novel are very much like a primitive society, having to start from scratch and make a go of it without the tools of modern society, hence, they become as primitive and violent because their wild setting affords them the opportunity to do so.

THREE: who dies in the novel -- how, why -- and why did the others not die?

One of the young boys, plus Piggy and Simon, all died in the novel. Simon was murdered ritually, and it seems the boys were actually exorcising their fears in savagely slaughtering the Christ-like Simon. Piggy -- who it seems was the story's last link to sanity and to intellectual thought within a civilized world -- was killed in an impulsive move by Roger, who had become increasingly sadistic during the story. As to how the "littun" died, the fire that was built to hopefully attract a passing ship got out of control. "That little 'un, gasped Piggy, "him with the mark on his face, I don't see him. Where is he now? The crowd was silent as death…. The boys looked at each other fearfully, unbelieving. 'Where is he now?" (pp. 58-59).

When Simon was murdered, it was not intentional that he in particular be killed; but he was trying to tell the group that the real beast was just a dead soldier with a parachute and in the dark he was seen by the group in a moment of wild passion as "the beast." "The circle became a horseshoe. A thing was crawling out of the forest. It came darkly, uncertainly. The shrill screaming what rose before the beast was like a pain. The beast stumbled into the horseshoe… the beast was on its knees in the center, its arms folded over its face… the beast struggled forward, broke the ring and fell over the steep edge of the rock to the sand by the water. At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, lept on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore…its blood was staining the sand" (213-14).

Ralph, true to the kind of person and leader he was at the start of the story, was the only one to openly acknowledge the horrifying reality of having savagely killed Simon. Ralph is smart enough and has his wits about him enough to fully realize that he is getting caught up too in the barbarian-like behaviors of this island community. Piggy on the other hand does not accept responsibility for what they have done to Simon. Piggy even blamed Simon. Piggy said, "It was an accident…that what it was, an accident. Coming in the dark -- he hadn't no business crawling like that out of the dark. He was batty. He asked for it… We was on the outside. We never done nothing, we never seen nothing" (220-221).

Piggy dies during a fight between Ralph and Jack, which had been brewing the whole time they are on the island. Piggy berates the two fighting members for acting like savages, and for not cooperating to make the survival of the group an assured thing. A boulder crashes down after Roger pulls the lever and it knocks Piggy off the rock bridge and he plummets to the rocks below. The boulder hits Piggy and the conch is smashed as well. Since Piggy was the rational, intelligent one among the group, his death marks the end of any hope of rationality and sanity.

"The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee; the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist. Piggy, saying nothing, with no time for even a grunt, traveled through the air sideways from the rock… Piggy fell forth feet and landed on his back across the square red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff came out that turned red… his arms and legs twitched a bit, like a pig's after it has been killed…" (255-56).

FOUR: Is this a religious allegory? Is Simon portrayed as a Christ figure?

This novel is most certainly allegorical albeit not every allegorical link is based on religion. There are evidences of allegory and hints of religious tones throughout the story. One can easily put the pieces together given the timing of the novel and the setting and the plot as well. A naval officer, an officer who is heavily involved in a bloody and savage world war, rescues the protagonist, Ralph, and the island serves the novelist as a microcosm of that violent world at war. The island the boys arrive on is compared to Eden. Golding writes:

"Beyond the platform there was more enchantment. Some act of God -- a typhoon perhaps, or the storm that can accompanied his own arrival (9)… the ground beneath them was a bank covered with coarse grass, torn everywhere by the upheaval of fallen trees, scattered with decaying coconuts and palm saplings" (5).

Simon certainly stands out as a religious character (could be that Golding used the name Simon after "Simon Peter" in the New Testament of the Bible). But moreover Simon is the one character that has saintly qualities even in the wild environment the boys were part of. Jack, too, has a name that could be an offshoot of the Gospel According to John, a disciple of Christ; if Golding was using Jack as a reference to John, it was an ironic distortion but that is common in literature and so it is altogether possible that is what Golding was doing.

Given that Simon is the spiritual one, and that the island is (for some, not for Simon or Ralph) a frightful place at night with a beast out there, the juxtaposition of Simon and the savagery, the hostility and irrational fears that other have, makes this something of an allegory of Christ facing demons. Additionally, when Ralph first blows on the couch shell, with a loud statement that the boys have survived miraculously after the crash, the blowing of the shell could have been allegorically linked to Gabriel blowing his horn, announcing good news.

Simon, meanwhile, helps the little boys like Christ helped the children, and Simon meditates and goes up to the mountain, which seems a parallel to Jesus Christ, and to Biblical concepts in general. Moses went up the mountain and came back down with the Ten Commandments. In fact Christ came to earth, the Biblical story goes, to save humans from their sins. In Lord of the Flies, there is a need for a moral order, and there is a need to stop the boys from deteriorating into savages; of course, Simon doesn't save them but he is crucified, if you will, by those who didn't really know whom they were killing. "Father forgive them for they know not what they do," Christ said on the cross at Calvary. The boys who killed Simon did not know whom they were murdering, and hence, Simon was a martyr.

FIVE: symbolism of conch, glasses, fire, etc.

The conch shell is a symbol of order, or of the need for order. It was blown when there was to be a meeting among the boys. It is also a symbol of how delicate life on the island could be, and its deep sound would echo back from the pink granite of the mountain, proving that it had resilience in terms of its role in the story. In the end of the story it is smashed; this is a symbol of sadness and since it was such a beautiful shell, when any object so delicate and lovely is smashed, that symbolized the inability of society to protect and cherish beauty and meaning.

Piggy's glasses symbolized the ability to create and the need for fire. Fire symbolized hope for rescue; for Piggy the glasses also symbolized his need to see the world as it was for them. Fire (as was indicated previously) was the symbol of potential freedom; it also symbolized the boys' need for sustenance (they cooked meat over the fire). Lord of the Flies symbolizes the hostile environment and the cynicism of society.

The mask Jack painted on himself symbolized how he enjoyed changing his identity and releasing the beast inside. He could be anyone he wanted to be, and in his desire to have more power than Ralph, he liked having the mask as a kind of shield from what he is perceived as. The beast is clearly a symbol that the boys had. They tried to be brave but at nighttime it got very spooky on the island and their flagging courage wasn't enough to prevent them from feeling fear; hence, the beast was the symbol of fear. The darkness -- symbolizing the unknown and the fearful on the island -- was what made the thought of the beast real enough to scare the boys. The mountain symbolized the challenges that were ahead for the boys. They had a mountain of problems for sure, and just ascending the mountain would not free them; the mountain and the forest were symbol of the forces of nature, the natural world's barriers that have to be overcome by anyone, and in particular the young boys on this island had to overcome these natural world challenges.