Lord of the Flies
by William Golding
(Penguin, 2016)
All round him the long scar smashed into the jungle ws a bath of heat. He was clambering heavily among the creepers and broken trunks.
Page 7.
Always, almost visible was the heat.
Page 10.
He became conscious of the weight of clothes, kicked his shoes off fiercely, and ripped off each stocking with its elastic garter in a single movement. Then he leapt back on the terrace, pulled off his shirt, and stood there among the skull-like coconuts with green shadows form the palms and the forest sliding over his skin. He undid the snake-clasp of he belt, lugged off his shorts and pants, and stood there naked, looking at the dazzling beach and the water.
Page 10.
Ralph danced out into the hot air of the beach and then returned as a fighter-plane, with wings wept back, and machine-gunned Piggy.
Page 11.
The beach was interrupted abruptly by the square motif of the landscape; a great platform of pink granite thrust up uncompromisingly through forest and terrace and sand and lagoon to make a raised jetty four feet high. The top of this was covered with a think layer of soil and coarse grass and shaded with young palm trees. There was not enough soil for them to grow to any height, and when they reached perhaps twenty feet they fell and dried, forming a criss-cross pattern of trunks, very convenient to sit on the palms that still stood made a green roof, covered on the underside with a quivering tangle of reflections from the lagoon.
Page 12.
Piggy bore this with a sort of humble patience.
Page 13.
Piggy looked up at Ralph. All the shadows on Ralph’s face were reversed; green above, bright below from the lagoon. A blur of sunlight was crawling across his hair.
Page 15.
Ralph grasped the idea and hit the shell with air from his diaphragm. Immediately the thing sounded. A deep, harsh note boomed under the palms, spread through the intricacies of the forest, and echoed back form the pink granite of the mountain. Clouds of birds rose form the treetops, and something squealed and ran in the undergrowth.
Page 17.
Ralph turned to him quickly. This was the voice of one who knew his own mind.
Page 21.
The clamor changed from the general wish for a chief to an election by acclaim of Ralph himself. None of the boys could have found good reason for this; what intelligence had been shown was traceable to Piggy, while the most obvious leader was Jack. But there was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was his size, and attractive appearance; and most obviously, yet most powerfully, there was the conch. The being that had blown that, had sat waiting for them on the platform with the delicate thing balanced on his knees, was set apart. Page 22.
“Jack’s in charge of the choir. They can be - what do you want them to be?”
“Hunters.”
Page 23.
“Better Piggy than Fatty,” he said at last, with the directness of genuine leadership, “and any way, I’m sorry if you feel like that. Now go back, Piggy, and take names. That’s your job.”
Page 25.
The air was thick with butterflies, lifting, fluttering, settling.
Page 28.
Jack pointed down.
“That’s where we landed.”
Beyond falls and cliffs there was a gash visible in the trees; there were the splintered trunks and then the drag, leaving only a fringe of palm between the scar and the sea. There, too, jutting into the lagoon, was the platform, with insect-like figures moving near it.
Page 29.
Eyes shining, mouths open, triumphant, they savored the right of domination. They were lifted up: were friends.
Page 29.
When Simon mentioned his hunger the others became aware of theirs.
Page 30.
“Nobody knows where we are. … Perhaps they knew where we was going to; and perhaps not. But they don’t know where we are ‘cos we never got there.”
Page 34.
“The plane was shot down in flames. Nobody knows where we are. We may be here a long tine.”
Page 34.
"This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we’ll have fun."
Page 35.
“We can help them to find us. If a ship comes near the island they may not notice us. So we must make smoke on top of the mountain. We must make a fire.”
Page 38.
All at once the crowd swayed toward the island and was gone - following Jack. Even the tiny children went and did their best among the leaves and broken branches. Ralph was left, holding the conch, with no one but Piggy.
Page 38.
Amid the breeze, the shouting, the slanting sunlight on the high mountain, was shed that glamour, that strange invisible light of friendship, adventure, and content.
Page 39.
“We ought to have more rules. Where the conch is, that’s a meeting. The same up here as down there.”
Page 42.
We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything. So we’ve got to do the right things.”
Page 42.
“The first thing we ought to have made was shelters down there by the beach. It wasn’t half cold down there in the night. But the first time ralph says ‘fire’ you goes howling and screaming up this here mountain. Like a pack of kids!”
Page 45.
“How can you expect to be rescued if you don’t put first things first and act proper?”
Page 45.
His sandy hair, considerably longer than it had been when they dropped in, was lighter now; and his bare back was a mass of dark freckles and peeling sunburn. A sharpened stick about five feet long trailed form his right hand, and except for a pair of tattered shorts held up by his knife belt he was naked.
Page 48.
“If you’re hunting sometimes you catch yourself feeling as if - “ He flushed suddenly. “There’s nothing in it of course. Just a feeling. But you can feel as if you’re not hunting, but - being hunted, as if something’s behind you all the time in the jungle.”
Page 53.
He wanted to explain how people were never quite what you thought they were.
Page 54.
They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling, unable to communicate.
Page 55.
The deep sea breaking miles away on the reef made an undertone less perceptible than the susurration of the blood.
Page 57.
The first rhythm that they became used to was the slow swing from dawn to quick dusk.
Page 58.
They ignored the miraculous, throbbing stars.
Page 58.
When the sun sank, darkness dropped on the island like an extinguisher and soon the shelters were full of restlessness, under the remote stars.
Nonetheless, the northern European tradition of work, play, and food right through the day, made it possible for them to adjust themselves wholly to this new rhythm.
Pages 58-59.
The smaller boys were known now by the generic title of “littluns.”
Page 59.
The undoubted littluns, those ages about six, led a quite distinct, and at the same time intense, life of their own. They ate most of the day, picking fruit where they could reach it and not particular about ripeness and quality. They were used now to stomachaches and a sort of chronic diarrhoea. They suffered untold terrors in the dark and huddled together for comfort. Apart from food and sleep, they found time for play, aimless and trivial, in the white sand by the bright water. They cried for their mothers much less often than might have been expected, they were very brown, and filthily dirty. They obeyed the summons of the conch, partly because Ralph blew it, and he was big enough to be a link with the adult world of authority; and partly because they enjoyed the entertainment of the assemblies. But otherwise they seldom bothered with the biguns and their passionately emotional and corporate life was their own.
Page 59.
He began and his laughter became a bloodthirsty snarling.
Page 64.
There had grown up tacitly among the biguns the opinion that Piggy was an outsider, not only by accent, which did not matter, but by fat, and ass-mar, and specs, and a certain disinclination for manual labor.
Page 65.
The fire was out, smokeless and dead; the watchers were gone. A pile of unused fuel lay ready.
Page 68.
His mind was crowded with memories, memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.
Page 70.
The two boys faced each other. There was the brilliant world of hunting, tactics, fierce exhilarations, skill; and there was the world of longing and baffled commonsense.
Page 71.
So Ralph asserted his chieftainship and could not have chosen a better way if he had thought for days. Against his weapon, so indefinable and so effective, Jack was powerless and raged without knowing why. By the time the pile was built, they were on different sides of a high barrier.
Page 73.
Jack looked round for understanding but found only respect. Ralph stood among the ashes of the signal fire, his hands full of meat, saying nothing.
Page 74.
Piggy could think. He could go step by step inside that fat head of his, only Piggy was no chief. But Piggy, for all his ludicrous body, had brains. Ralph was a specialist in thought now, and could recognize thought in another.
Page 78.
“Life,” said Piggy expansively, “is scientific, that’s what it is. In a year or two when the war’s over they’ll be traveling to Mars and back.”
Page 84.
“The rules!” shouted Ralph. “You’re breaking the rules!”
“Who cares?”
Ralph summoned his wits.
“Because the rules are the only thing we’ve got!”
But Jack was shouting against him.
“Bollocks to the rules! We’re strong - we hunt!”
Page 91.
“If I blow the conch and they don’t come back; then we’ve had it. We shan’t keep the fire going. We’ll be like animals. We’ll never be rescued.”
Page 92.
“If Jack was chief he’d have all hunting and no fire. We’d be here till we died.”
Page 93.
A sign came down from the world of grown-ups, though at the time there was no child wake to read it. There was a sudden bright explosion and corkscrew trail across the sky; then darkness again and stars. There was a speck above the island, a figure dropping swiftly beneath a parachute, a figure that hung with dangling limbs. … The figure fell and crumpled among the blue flowers of the mountainside, but now there was a gently breeze at this height too and the parachute flopped and banged and pulled. So the figure, with feet that dragged behind it, slid up the mountain. Yard by yard, puff by puff, the breeze hauled the figure through the blue flowers, over the boulders and read stones, till it lay huddled among the shattered rocks of the mountaintop. Here the breeze was fitful and allowed the strings of the parachute to tangle and festoon; and the figure sat, its helmeted head between its knees, held by a complication of lines. When the breeze blew, the lines would strain taut and some accident of this pull lifted the head and chest upright so that the figure seemed to peer across the brow of the mountain. Then, each time the wind dropped, the lines would slacken and the figure bow forward again, sinking its head between its knees. So as the stars moved across the sky, the figure sat on the mountaintop and bowed and sank and bowed again.
Pages 95-96.
By custom now one conch did for both twins, for their substantial unity was recognized.
Page 100.
“Conch! Conch!” shouted Jack. “We don’t need the conch anymore. We know who ought to say things. What good did Simon do speaking, or Bill, or Walter? It’s time some people knew they’ve got to keep quiet and leave deciding things to the rest of us.”
Pages 101-102.
Ralph planned is toilet. He would like to have a pair of scissors and cut this hair - he flung the mass back - cut this filthy hair right back to half an inch. He would like to have a bath, a proper wallow with soap. He passed his tongue experimentally over his teeth and decided that a toothbrush would come in handy, too. Then there were his nails. Page 109.
The darkness and desperate enterprise gave the night a kind of dentist’s chair unreality.
Page 122.
There was confusion in the darkness, and the creature lifted its head, holding toward them the ruin of a face.
Page 123.
“I’m not going to play any longer. Not with you.”
Most of the boys were looking down now, at the grass or their feet. Jack cleared his throat again.
“I’m not going to be a part of Ralph’s lot - “
He looked along the right-hand logs, numbering the hunters that had been a choir.
“I’m going off by myself. He can catch his own pigs. Anyone who wants to hunt when I do can come too.”
Page 127.
Only Piggy could have the intellectual daring to suggest moving the fire from the mountain.
Page 129.
The greatest ideas are the simplest. Now that there was something to be done they worked with passion. Piggy was so full of delight and expanding liberty in Jack’s departure, so full of pride in his contribution to the good of society, that he helped to fetch wood.
Page 129.
For the first time on the island, Piggy himself removed his one glass, knelt down, and focused the sun on tinder.
Page 130.
As the fire died down so did the excitement.
Page 130.
“And about the beast. When we kill we’ll leave some of the kill for it. Then it won’t bother us, maybe.”
Page 133.
Jack held up the head and jammed the soft throat down on the pointed end of the stick which pierced through into the mouth. He stood back and the head hung there, a little blood dribbling down the stick. … The loudest noise was the buzzing of flies over the spilled guts.
Pages 136-137.
The pile of guts was a black blob of flies that buzzed like a saw. After a while these flies found Simon. Gorged, they alighted by his runnels of sweat and drank. They tickled under his nostrils and played leapfrog on his thighs. They were black and iridescent green and without number; and in front of Simon the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and grinned.
Page 138.R
alph considered this and understood. He was vexed to find how little he thought like a grownup and sighed again. The island was getting worse and worse.
Page 139.
“We just got to go on, that’s all. That’s what grownups would do.”
Page 139.
The forest near them burst into uproar. Demoniac figures with faces of white and red and green rushed out howling, so that the littluns fled screaming. Out of the corner of his eyes, Ralph saw Piggy running. Two figures rushed at the fire and he prepared to defend himself but they grabbed half-burnt branches and raced away along the beach. The three others stood still, watching Ralph, and he saw that the tallest of them, stark naked save for the paint and a belt, was Jack.
Page 140.
Simon felt his knees smack the rock. He crawled forward and soon he understood. The tangle of liens showed him the mechanics of the parody; he examined the white nasal bones, the teeth, the colors of corruption. He saw how pitilessly the layers of rubber and canvas held together the poor body that should be rotting away. Then the wind blew again and the figure lifted, bowed, and breathed foully at him. Simon knelt on all fours and was sick till his stomach was empty. Then he took the lines in his hands; he freed them from the rocks and the figure from the wind’s indignity.
Pages 146-147.
Before the party had started a great log had ben dragged into the center of the lawn and Jack, painted and garlanded, sat there like an idol. There were piles of meat on green leaves near him, and fruit, and coconut shells full of drink.
Pages 148-149.
Piggy once more was the center of social derision so that everyone felt cheerful and normal.
Page 149.
Evening was come, not with calm beauty gut with the threat of violence.
Page 150.
Now a great wind blew the rain sideways, cascading the water from the forest trees. On the mountaintops the parachute filled and moved; the figure slid, rose to its feet, spun, swayed down through a vastness of wet air, and trod with ungainly feet the tops of the high trees; falling, still falling, it sank toward the beach and the boys rushed screaming into the darkness. The parachute took the figure forward, furrowing the lagoon, and bumped it over the reef and out to sea.
Page 153.
Somewhere over the darkened curve of the world the sun and mon were pulling, and the film of water on the earth planet was held, bulging slightly on one side while the solid core turned. The great wave of the tide moved farther along the island and the water lifted. Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon’s dread body moved out toward the open sea.
Page 154.
“I’m frightened. Of us. I want to go home. Oh God, I want to go home.”
Page 157.
“We don’t want another night without fire.”
He looked round guiltily at the three boys standing by. This was the first time he had admitted the double function of the fire. Certainly one was to send up a beckoning column of smoke; but the other was to be a hearth now and a comfort until they slept.
Page 162.
Ralph dredged in his fading knowledge of the world.
“We might get taken prisoner by the Reds.”
Page 162.
They understood only too well the liberation into savagery that the concealing paint brought.
“Well, we won’t be painted,” said Ralph. “because we aren’t savages.”
Page 172.
Freed by the paint, they had tied their hair back and were more comfortable than he was. Ralph made a resolution to tie his own back afterwards.
Page 175.
Jack, identifiable by personality and red hair, was advancing from the forest. A hunter crouched on either side. All three were masked in black and green. Behind them n the grass the headless and paunched body of a sow lay where they had dropped it
Page 176.
“I go this to say. You’re acting like a crowd of kids.”
The booing rose and died again as Piggy lifted the white, magic shell.
“Which is better - to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is.”
A great clamor rose among the savages. Piggy shouted again.
“Which is better - to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill?”
Page 180.
The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee; the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist. Piggy, saying nothing, with no time for even a grunt, traveled through the air sideways from the rock, turning over as he went. The rock bounded twice and was lost in the forest. Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across the square red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff came out and turned red. Piggy’s arms and legs twitched a bit, like a pig’s after it has been killed. Then the sea breathed again in a long, slow sigh, the water boiled white and pink over the rock; and when it went sucking back again, the body of Piggy was gone.
Page 181.
The breaking of the conch and the deaths of Piggy and Simon lay over the island like a vapor. These painted savages would go further and further. Then there was that indefinable connection between himself and Jack; who therefore would never let him alone; never.
Page 184.
The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers and won’t tell; a sick fear and rage swept him. Fiercely he hit out at the filthy thing in front of him that bobbed like a toy and came back, still grinning into his face, so that he lashed and cried out in loathing.
Page 185.
They were savages it was true; but they were human, and the ambushing fears of the deep night were coming on.
Pages 185-186.
Lying there in the darkness, he knew he was an outcast.
“’Cos I has some sense.”
Page 186.
What was the sensible thing to do? There was no Piggy to talk sense. There was no solemn assembly for debate nor dignity of the conch.
Page 196.
He was beginning to dread the curtain that might waver in his brain, blacking out the sense of danger, making a simpleton of him.
Page 196.
There was another noise to attend to now, a deep grumbling noise, as though the forest itself were angry with him, a somber noise across which the ululations were scribbled excruciatingly as on slate.
Page 196.
They had smoked him out and set the island on fire.
Page 197.
Hide was better than a tree because you had a chance of breaking the line if you were discovered.
Page 197.
He saw that a great heaviness of smoke lay between the island and the sun.
Page 198.
Under the thicket, the earth was vibrating very slightly; or perhaps there was a sound beneath the obvious thunder of the fire and scribbled ululations that was too low to hear.
Page 198.
The fools! The fools! The fire must be almost at the fruit trees - what would they eat tomorrow?
Page 198.
Ralph screamed, a scream of fright and anger and desperation. His legs straightened, the screams became continuous and foaming. He shot forward, burst the thicket, was in the open, screaming, snarling, bloody. He swung the stake and the savage tumbled over; but there were others coming toward him, crying out. He swerved as a spear flew past and then was silent, running. All at once the lights flickering ahead of him merged together, the roar of the forest rose to thunder and a tall bush directly in his path burst into a great fan-shaped flame. He swung to the right, running desperately fast, with the heat beating on his left side and the fire racing forward like a tide. The ululation rose behind him and spread along, a series of short sharp cries, the sighting call. A brown figure showed up at his right and fell away. They were all running, all crying out madly. He could hear them crashing in the undergrowth and on the left was the hot, bright thunder of the fire. He forgot his wounds, his hunger and thirst, and became fear; hopeless fear on flying feet, rushing through to forest toward the open beach.
Pages 199-200.
He staggered to his feet, tensed for more terrors, and looked up at a huge peaked cap. It was a white-topped cap, and above the green shade of the peak was a crown, an anchor, gold foliage. He saw white drill, epaulettes, a revolver, a row of gilt buttons down the front of a uniform.
Page 200.
“Who’s boss here?”
“I am,” said Ralph loudly.
A little boy who wore the remains of an extraordinary black cap on his red air and who carried the remains of a pair of spectacles at his waist, started forward, then changed his mind and stood still.
Page 201.
The island was scorched up like dead wood - Simon was dead - and Jack had … The tears began to flow and sobs shook him. He gave himself up to them now for the first time on the island; great, shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench his whole body. His voice rose under the black smoke before the burning wreckage of the island; and infected by that emotion, the other boys began to shake and sob too. And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.
Page 202.
Lord of the Flies is not only about survival. It’s also about the human capacity for evil, the savagery of groups, fear of the other, and the breakdown of the social order.
Page 206.
The central theme of young adult literature is becoming an adult, finding the answer to the question “Who am I, and what am I going to do about it?”
Page 206.