Instinctive versus Learned Behavior in William Golding's Lord of the Flies
Written in 1954 by William Golding, Lord of the Flies, a novel which describes the exploits of a group of young children on a deserted island, is a thought-provoking book having as theme the pessimistic view that man depends on society and technology to remain civilized and that without those he will return to the incipient stage of the human being, that is, savagery.
This dual nature of man is shown during the whole action of the novel, either by symbols, settings, facts or by characters and their ways of thinking. The most important symbols of the book are Ralph and the conch, Piggy and his glasses, Simon seen as pure goodness, all in favor of morals and civilization, and the beast, the tribal dances, the evil friendship between Jack and Roger, the growing violence during hunting and the murders, all suggesting the self-abandon of the characters to the instinctive tendencies.
The first chapters of the book introduce the setting, which is a deserted island having the shape of a boat (Golding 29). This is one of the author's iro 949i85j nies, as the boys are on a "boat" but cannot go back home because the "boat" is stranded there. The current around the island seems to be flowing backwards, fact which foreshadows the boys' involution towards savagery that the reader will be acquainted with while going through the novel.
At the beginning, when the boys, after arriving on the island because their plane crashed, start to gather up, they realize they are "no grownups" (8) and try to organize their own society, using a shell to call assemblies. They choose Ralph, the boy with "fair hair" (4) and about whom Golding says that "you could see now that he might make a boxer, as far as width and heaviness of shoulders went, but there was a mildness about his mouth and eyes that proclaimed no devil", as the leader of the group. Ralph apparently proves himself intelligent when giving Jack, a boy with a sinister appearance, different from Ralph's, with his red hair and his ugliness (Rosenfield 172), the lead of the hunting party, formed of his choir boys. This decision is actually Ralph's first mistake, as we shall see.
The group uses the conch shell as a symbol of order and democracy, sets some rules, establishes property and builds huts.
The boys' innocence is shown in the passage when Jack cannot stab the pig because that act required great violence. Still, his quote "next time" is the first sign of disturbance, his future as a savage hunter being foreshadowed in his words (Summary and Significant Events).
Another sign of disorder is the appearance of fear. As the characters are children, their imagination runs wild and they start to be afraid of things that actually don't exist. Further in the novel, one of the boys says he has seen a snake in the woods. The supposed creature is actually Simon, who was returning from his secret place in the woods. This is Golding's first suggestion that the beast the boys fear is human.
An irreversible conflict appears between Ralph and Jack, while the leader of the hunting party gives the boys the impression that the beast really exists, saying that, if it was necessary, he and his army would fight the beast. This statement offers moral shelter to the group, but is against what Ralph tries to do, which is to explain the boys that they are not in danger.
The conflict only grows stronger when Jack's concern with hunting disobeys Ralph's decision that a fire must be kept going and a ship goes by without seeing them. The fire is another symbol of civilization because it can bring salvation and, with it, the return to the society at home.
The third and fourth chapters show a disturbing face of Jack, as his reason for hunting is not food, but his personal amusement. His violent side comes to light at first when he punches Piggy and then, when behind the mask he had put on before going hunting and which seems to free him from self-consciousness, after stabbing a pig, he and his choir boys perform a tribal dance and Maurice pretends to be the animal.
As the growing fear of the boys leads to anarchy, Jack leads to the split of the society Ralph had struggled to keep in one piece, manifesting a terrible desire for power. Golding offers a clear sign that there's no more civilization, that instinct takes over when Percival, one of the "littluns" (19), keeps repeating his address in order not to forget it.
The sixth chapter called "Beast from Air" once more brings a human beast in the scene, as the dead pilot's body falls on the island's mountain and brings the war from the outer world into the island's reality, too. Now that some of the boys see the corpse which they believe is alive, their fear somehow brings Ralph and Jack back together, but only for a little while, as they look for a place where they can be safe.
Chapter seven shows the boys at first looking like savages - dirty, with long hair - and then acting in consequence as they perform another tribal dance, where Robert plays the role of the pig and gets hurt as "the desire to squeeze and hurt was overmastering" (170).
The final split of society happens in the eight chapter, when Jack tries to overthrow Ralph from his position as chief and, being unsuccessful, creates his own authority and the other boys, except for Ralph, Piggy and Sam'n'Eric, join him. They see the whole action as part of a game. Jack continues to act as the beast exists and leaves the head of the pig they have caught for the feast as a gift for the creature. This is the main characteristic of Jack's society, which is based on adoration and sacrifices.
The head, which the author calls "the Lord of the Flies", is the symbol of the "descend from civilized behavior to animalistic savagery" (Rosenfield 171). It also connects the Edenic image of the island to what is underground, that is hell, through the stick sharpened at both ends. This way, the head symbolizes Satan, not seen as a material force though, but rather as an internal evil - the human nature leaned towards hatred and immorality.
After discovering the truth about the pilot's corpse, Simon, the Christ figure of the book (Spitz 172), representing pure goodness, rushes to tell the others they have nothing to fear, but it is too late. The inner evil had already taken control of the boys' minds and they perform yet another dance, this time really having a victim which they think is the beast. Simon gets killed and this moment wipes out the clear cut between good, represented by Ralph and Piggy, and bad, as the two boys actively take part to it, too. Still, the fact that they search for reasons for what they have done shows that they try to conserve their moral principles.
Jack has weak solutions to important problems, for, realizing they cannot start their own fire, he chooses to steal it from the others, when, they could have simply asked for it in Ralph's opinion. As the boys move yet further from civilized behavior, they attack Ralph, Piggy and Sam'n'Eric during the night and steal the glasses, acting like uncivilized people. As Piggy loses his possibility too see, so do the boys lose their hope to go back to being moral (Rosenfield 173).
Now the conflict between Jack and Ralph becomes a conflict between savagery and order. Jack is criticized for his way of interpreting the rules and his choice of following them or not. The problem is not what kind of civilized society Jack and his group should follow, but whether they will be civilized at all.
As they decide to confront Jack directly, Ralph and Piggy try to readopt the manners of the society they used to live in, hoping that Jack's followers will see the striking differences between the boys dressed as they all looked the day the plane crashed and them, who were only wearing few clothes and war paint.
As Piggy, the intellectual of the island, asks what they would choose between rules and living in anarchy, the unintentional violence shown in the primal dances becomes premeditated murder. Roger, Jack's right hand, drops a big rock on Piggy, killing him and shattering the conch shell at the same time. The last symbol of order has disappeared and Ralph becomes the hunted animal.
The reader can clearly see that the school boys are exhibiting a pure savage behavior, as they have no morals or sense of responsibility. Ralph finds himself in the position of an animal and acts like one, running or fighting, using his animalistic instincts to survive. The boys' self-destructive behavior, as they almost burn the island down, leaves behind images of decay, but also gets them saved when the passengers of a ship see the smoke. The symbol of the auto-destructive actions - the spear sharpened at both ends - clearly shows that they don't just hurt the enemy, but also hurt themselves, as the spear points towards both.
The officer who comes on the island interprets the war paint and the hunting as a child's game, but the boys were not playing savage anymore; they had become savages. Ralph loses his innocence when he realizes that all the violence came from instinct: "in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence" (Golding 202), and that the involution of the human being when living in a society where rules are not stronger than the evil that rests in human beings and where the absence of any form of technology pushes the level of society to its pre-civilized status is imminent.
Works cited:
Babb, Howard S. The Novels of William Golding.
Golding,
William. Lord of the Flies.
Rosenfield, Claire. "Men of a Smaller Growth: A Psychological Analysis of William Golding's Lord of the Flies" in Literature and Psychology, Vol. XI, 1961.
"Summary
and Significant Events". Lord of the
Flies.
Spitz, David. "Power and Authority: An Interpretaion of Golding's Lord of the Flies". 1970.
|
