View/Open - Scholarly Commons Home

maintaining the fire. The fire goes out whilst the boys are away hunting. During that
time, Ralph sights a ship passing by the island. Desperately, he climbs the island’s
mountain to light the fire, but the quest is pointless as the ship drifts out of sight and
hopes for rescue are extinguished. Because the majority of boys valued the hunt over
maintaining the fire, what results is the awful realisation that they could have been
rescued. “The two boys faced each other. There was the brilliant world of hunting,
tactics, fierce exhilaration, skill; and there was the world of longing and baffled
common-sense” (p. 71). The consequence of this irreconcilable disparity in the values
of the dominant characters is the disintegration of the established, but fragile, social
order which ultimately proves fatal.
Contributing to this collapse is the increasingly pervasive fear of the beast. This at first
appears to be the result of the overactive imagination of the smallest boys reacting to
their new alien adult-free world. However, the sight of a dead man who arrived via a
parachute onto the island transforms the imagined beast into something real and
tangible. The boys’ reaction is a kind of primal fear. The resulting instinctual savagery
is more compatible with Jack’s disregard for the conventions of their previous life and
preference to hunt and kill than Ralph’s insistence on maintaining the fire and adhering
to the rules.
Jack, using this fear, attracts and coerces most of the boys into his new tribe. Simon (a
boy who has extraordinary insight into their predicament and their reaction to it),
having discovered that the source of their fear (the beast) is actually a dead man,
releases him to float off the island in the parachute which brought him and comes to
relay this tale to the others. However, as Simon arrives to dispel their fears, the others
are so absorbed in their primeval dance celebrating the hunt, that he becomes the victim
and is killed in their ritual.
The penultimate moment comes when Ralph, who has not joined Jack’s followers, is
being hunted by all the other boys. To hunt Ralph down, they light a fire which ignites
the whole island. Ironically, in the quest to hunt and kill Ralph they employ his
methods and successfully achieve his primary goal; to be rescued. The smoke from the
fire attracts a passing ship. The arrival on the island of a man in “white drill, epaulettes,
a revolver, a row of gilt buttons down the front of a uniform” (p. 213) brings the
73