William Golding's Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies

In the midst of a raging war, a plane evacuating a group of English boys from Britain is shot down over a deserted tropical island. Marooned, the boys set about electing a leader and finding a way to be rescued. They choose Ralph as their leader, and Ralph appoints Jack to be the leader of the hunters. Ralph, Jack, and Simon set off on an expedition to explore the island. When they return, Ralph declares that they must light a signal fire to attract the attention of passing ships. The boys begin to do so, using the lens from Piggy's eyeglasses to ignite dead wood, but they are more interested in playing than in paying close attention to their duties, and the fire quickly ignites the forest. A large swath of dead wood burns out of control. One of the youngest boys disappears, presumably having burned to death.

At first, the boys enjoy their life without grown-ups. They splash in the lagoon and play games, though Ralph complains that they should be maintaining the signal fire and building huts for shelter. The hunters have trouble catching a pig, but Jack becomes increasingly preoccupied with the act of hunting. One day, a ship passes by on the horizon, and Ralph and Piggy notice, to their horror, that the signal fire has burned out; it had been the hunters' responsibility to maintain it. Furious, Ralph accosts Jack, but the hunter has just returned with his first kill, and all the boys seem gripped with a strange frenzy, reenacting the chase in a kind of wild dance. When Piggy criticizes him, Jack hits him across the face.

Ralph blows the conch shell used to summon the boys and reprimands them in a speech intended to restore order. Yet there is a larger, more insidious problem than keeping the signal fire lit and overcoming the difficulties of hunting: the boys have started to become afraid. The littlest boys (known as "littluns") have been troubled by nightmares from the beginning, and more and more boys now believe that there is some sort of beast or monster lurking on the island. At the meeting, the older boys try to convince the others to think rationally: if there were a monster, where would it hide during the daytime? One of the littluns suggests that it hides in the sea, a proposition that terrifies the whole group.