Lord of the
Flies
by William Golding
***
The day the child realises that all adults
are imperfect,
he becomes an adolescent. . .
Alden Nowlan
he becomes an adolescent. . .
Alden Nowlan
Once upon a time, landing
on a tropical island with no adults around seemed like a dream come true for
the lost boys of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a mere interval of play like the adventure stories
they had read, books such as R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, before the grownups arrive to rescue them.
But as things fall apart, as the only adult who reaches their island is a dead
pilot from the war high overhead, as the boys themselves break into quarreling factions, some yearn for a return of the certainties adults seemed to provide.
Among the group of
pre-adolescent boys, 12-year-old Ralph has been elected chief. A second boy,
known only by his nickname, Piggy, is a semi-outcast, set apart by his physical
weaknesses – poor sight, asthma, and a fatness that persists despite the lean
diet of fruit available to most of the group. Despite these physical failings, his
greater intelligence and the fire-making technology he possesses in his
eyeglasses, have made him Ralph’s ally in attempting to maintain a signal fire
to guide rescuers to the island.
Now a third boy, Jack
Merridew, threatens the peace of the island. Deserting the signal fire in favor
of hunting the island’s native pigs, Jack challenges Ralph for leadership. It
is a challenge the more urgent and chilling as Jack’s followers finally manage
to kill a pig, and tempt the rest with the promise of meat.
And when the signal fire
goes out, those left in darkness long for the return of the grownups.
Grownups, Piggy says, “ain’t
afraid of the dark. They’d meet and have tea and discuss. Then things ‘ud be
all right. . . .’”
He forgets, like the child
he really is, that the catastrophic war ignited by those same grownups is the
reason for the boy’ current abandonment. When Jack, to secure his own
authority, steals the poor remains of Piggy’s already broken spectacles, Piggy loses
his intellectual as well as physical vision.
“‘What’s grownups goin’ to
think?’” he asks. “‘I’m going to that Jack Merridew an’ tell him, I am.’”
As Piggy pays for his
blind belief in the rule of law, the remainder of Ralph’s followers desert him.
Determined to eliminate any challenge to his leadership, Jack incites his
faction to hunt Ralph down in a ghastly parody of their pig hunts.
With the remains of
Piggy’s eyeglasses, he sets fire to the forest where Ralph hides. The
uncontrolled flames threaten to overwhelm the island, just as the probably
nuclear holocaust in the outside world threatens all of human civilization. As
the hunters close in, a being so strange Ralph doesn’t at first recognize it
for what it is, a British naval officer whose cutter has just landed.
As flames engulf the palms
by the island’s beach, “the officer grinned cheerfully at Ralph. ‘We saw your
smoke. What have you been doing? Having a war or something?’. . . Jolly good
show. Like the Coral Island.’” And for the first time, Ralph weeps.
(Next Friday, Adventure
classics begins an October of Halloween horror with J.S. LeFanu’s short story,
“Carmilla.”)
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