This same humiliation falls upon the innocents of Lord of the Flies. In their childish pride they attempt to impose an order or pattern upon the vital chaos of their own nature, and so they commit the error and “sin” of Pentheus, the “man of many sorrows.” The penalties, as in the play, are bloodshed, guilt, utter defeat of reason. Finally, they stand before the officer, “a semicircle of little boys, their bodies streaked with colored clay, sharp sticks in their hands.” Facing that purblind commander (with his revolver and peaked cap), Ralph cries “for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart”; and the tribe of vicious hunters joins him in spontaneous choral lament But even Ralph could not trace the arc of their descent, could not explain why it’s no go, why things are as they are; for in the course of events he was at times among the hunters, one of them, and he grieves in part for the appalling ambiguities he has discovered in his own nature. He remembers those strange, interims of blindness and despair when a “shutter” clicked down over his mind and left him at the mercy of his own dark heart. In Ralph’s experience, then, the essence of the fable is spelled out: he suffers the dialectic we must all endure, and his failure to resolve it as we would wish demonstrates the limitations which have always plagued the species.
In the first hours on the island Ralph sports untroubled in the twilight of childhood and innocence, but after he sounds the conch he must confront the forces he has summoned to the granite platform beside the sunny lagoon. During that first assembly he seems to arbitrate with the grace of a young god (his natural bearing is dignified, princely) and, for the time being, a balance is maintained. The difficulties begin with the dream-revelation of the child distinguished by the birthmark. The boy tells of a snakelike monster prowling the woods by night, and at this moment the seed of fear is planted. Out of it will grow the mythic beast destined to become lord of the island. Rumors of his presence grow. There is a plague of haunting dreams—the first symptom of the irrational fear which is “mankind’s essential illness.”
In the chapter called “Beast from Water” the parliamentary debate becomes a blatant allegory in which each spokesman caricatures the position he defends. Piggy (the voice of reason) leads with the statement that life is scientific,” adds the usual Utopian promises (“when the war’s over they’ll be traveling to Mars and back”), and his assurance that such things will come to pass if only we control the senseless conflicts that impede progress. He is met with laughter and jeers (the crude multitude), and at this juncture a littlun interrupts to declare that the beast (ubiquitous evil) comes out of the sea. Maurice interjects to voice the doubt which curses them alclass="underline" “I don’t believe in the beast of course. As Piggy says, life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly…” Then Simon (the inarticulate seer) rises to utter the truth in garbled, ineffective phrases: there is a beast, but “it’s only us.” As always, his saving words are misunderstood, and the prophet shrinks away in confusion. Amid speculation that he means some kind of ghost, there is a silent show of hands for ghosts as Piggy breaks in with angry rhetorical questions: “What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?”. Taking his cue, Jack (savagery in excelsis) leaps to his feet and leads all but the “three blind mice” (Ralph, Piggy, Simon) into a mad jig of release down the darkening beach. The parliamentarians naively contrast their failure with the supposed efficiency of adults, and Ralph, in despair, asks for a sign from that ruined world.
In “Beast from Air” the sign, a dead man in a parachute, is sent down from the grownups, and the collapse foreshadowed in the allegorical parliament comes on with surprising speed. Ralph himself looks into the face of the enthroned tyrant on the mountain, and from that moment his young intelligence is crippled by fear. He confirms the reality of the beast and his confession of weakness insures Jack’s spectacular rise to power. Yet the ease with which Jack establishes his Dionysian order is hardly unaccountable. In its very first appearance the black-caped choir, vaguely evil in its military esprit, emerged ominously from a mirage and marched down upon the minority forces assembled on the platform. Except for Simon, pressed into service and out of step with the common rhythm, the choir is composed of servitors bound by the ritual and mystery of group consciousness. They share in that communion, and there is no real “conversion” or transfer of allegiance from good to evil when the chorus, ostensibly Christian, becomes the tribe of hunters. The lord they serve inhabits their own being. If they turn with relief from the burdens of the platform, it is because they cannot transcend the limitations of their own nature. Even the parliamentary pool of intelligence must fail in the attempt to explain all that manifests itself in our turbulent hearts, and the assertion that life is ordered, “scientific,” often appears mere bravado. It embodies tile sin of pride and, inevitably, evokes in some form the great god it has denied.
It is Simon who witnesses his coming and hears his words of wrath. In the thick undergrowth of the forest the boy discovers a refuge from the war of words. His shelter of leaves is a place of contemplation, a sequestered temple, scented and lighted by the white flowers of the night-blooming candlenut tree, where, in secret, he meditates on the lucid but somehow over-simple logic of Piggy and Ralph and the venal emotion of Jack’s challenges: There, in the infernal glare of the afternoon sun, he sees the killing of the sow by the hunters and the erection of the pig’s head on the sharpened stick. These acts signify not only the release from the blood taboo but also obeisance to the mystery and god who has come to be lord of the island-world. In the hours of one powerfully symbolic afternoon Simon sees the perennial fall which is the central reality of our history: me defeat of reason and the release of Dionysian madness in souls wounded by fear.
Awed by the hideousness of the dripping head (an image of the hunter’s own nature) the apprentice bacchantes suddenly run away, but Simon’s gaze is “held by that ancient, inescapable recognition”—an incarnation of the beast or devil bom again and again out of the human heart. Before he loses consciousness the epileptic visionary “hears” the truth which is inaccessible to the illusion-bound rationalist and the unconscious or irrational man alike: “‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter. ‘You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are as they are?’”. When Simon recovers from this trauma of revelation he finds on the mountain top that the “beast” is only a man. Like the pig itself, the dead man in the chute is fly-blown, corrupt, an obscene image of the evil that has triumphed in the adult world as well. Tenderly, the boy releases the lines so that the body can descend to earth, but the fallen man does not die. After Simon’s death, when the truth is once more lost, the figure rises, moves over the terrified tribe on the beach, and finally out to sea—a tyrannous ghost (history itself) which haunts and curses every social order.