Conch Shell In Lord Of The Flies Essay

Once stranded on an island, a group of boys become separated. Two of them are together, others are dispersed. The two boys who are together need a way to pull the others onto the beach to have a meeting. They look over the lagoon, and they see the perfect thing to do this with: a beautiful, colorful conch shell.

The two boys worked together to retrieve the shell. “In color the shell was deep cream, touched here and there with fading pink. Between the point, worn away into a little hole, and the pink lips of the mouth, lay eighteen inches of shell with a slight spiral twist and covered with a delicate, embossed pattern. Ralph shook sand out of the deep tube.” (Golding page 16) The fair colored boy, Ralph, blew the conch, knowing that it would draw the others in. Ralph was right, the other boys came. The conch was, at this point, established as an important point in the novel The Lord of the Flies by William Golding.

The conch shell quickly became a symbol of democracy on the island in The Lord of the Flies. It brought all the boys into a meeting in which they selected their leader, who would be called chief. "’Him with the shell.’ ‘Ralph! Ralph!’ ‘Let him be chief with the trumpet thing!’" (Golding page 22) The conch is established as a peace-keeping tool in the first chapter, “The Sound of the Shell,” when it is said that only the person holding the conch may speak during a meeting, though the conch would be passed around for anyone who wished to speak.

The conch was very important in The Lord of the Flies in many ways, but the way that William Golding really stressed the importance of this idol of sorts was the ties the boys felt to the conch. During the meetings held throughout the course of the book, ...

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...aws, or any form of authority, we would be in about the shape that the island is in at this point in the story.

The conch was almost its own character in Lord of the Flies! It had such a big part in the book, it was like a main character. The conch was symbolic of so many things; order, authority, power, and at times civilization. It brought all the boys together, but it tore them apart as well. The conch was one of the protagonists and one of the antagonists, both in the same book! William Golding was obviously trying to make the conch stand out and serve a purpose, and that it does. It was the boys’ connection to civilization, even when they thought it was lost. The conch held them to their memories of civilization, and how they knew how to do things, and kept all of them, except for Jack, who became a savage, from straying too far away from civilized ways.