Plot Overview
In the midst of a raging war, a plane evacuating a group of
schoolboys from
Ralph, Jack, and another boy, 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
succeed in igniting some dead wood by focusing sunlight through the lenses of
Piggy’s eyeglasses. However, the boys pay more attention to playing than to
monitoring the fire, and the flames quickly engulf the forest. A large swath of
dead wood burns out of control, and one of the youngest boys in the group
disappears, presumably having burned to death.
At first, the boys enjoy their life without grown-ups and
spend much of their time splashing in the water and playing games. Ralph,
however, complains that they should be maintaining the signal fire and building
huts for shelter. The hunters fail in their attempt to catch a wild pig, but
their leader, Jack, becomes increasingly preoccupied with the act of hunting.
When a ship passes by on the horizon one day, Ralph and
Piggy notice, to their horror, that the signal fire - which
had been the hunters’ responsibility to maintain - has burned out. Furious,
Ralph accosts Jack, but the hunter has just returned with his first kill, and
all the hunters seem gripped with a strange frenzy, reenacting the chase in a
kind of wild dance. Piggy criticizes Jack, who hits Piggy across the face.
Ralph blows the conch shell and reprimands the boys in a speech intended to
restore order. At the meeting, it quickly becomes clear that some of 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. The
older boys try to convince the others at the meeting to think rationally,
asking where such a monster could possibly hide during the daytime. One of the littluns suggests that it hides in the sea—a proposition
that terrifies the entire group.
Not long after the meeting, some military planes engage in a
battle high above the island. The boys, asleep below, do not notice the
flashing lights and explosions in the clouds. A parachutist drifts to earth on
the signal fire mountain, dead. Sam and Eric, the twins responsible for
watching the fire at night, are asleep and do not see the parachutist land.
When the twins wake up, they see the enormous silhouette of his parachute and
hear the strange flapping noises it makes. Thinking the island beast is at hand, they rush back to the camp in terror and report that
the beast has attacked them.
The boys organize a hunting expedition to search for the
monster. Jack and Ralph, who are increasingly at odds, travel up the mountain.
They see the silhouette of the parachute from a distance and think that it
looks like a huge, deformed ape. The group holds a meeting at which Jack and
Ralph tell the others of the sighting. Jack says that Ralph is a coward and
that he should be removed from office, but the other boys refuse to vote Ralph
out of power. Jack angrily runs away down the beach, calling all the hunters to
join him. Ralph rallies the remaining boys to build a new signal fire, this
time on the beach rather than on the mountain. They obey, but before they have
finished the task, most of them have slipped away to join Jack.
Jack declares himself the leader of the new tribe of hunters
and organizes a hunt and a violent, ritual slaughter of a sow to solemnize the
occasion. The hunters then decapitate the sow and place its head on a sharpened
stake in the jungle as an offering to the beast. Later, encountering the
bloody, fly-covered head, Simon has a terrible vision, during which it seems to
him that the head is speaking. The voice, which he imagines as belonging to the
Lord of the Flies, says that Simon will never escape him, for he exists within
all men. Simon faints. When he wakes up, he goes to the mountain, where he sees
the dead parachutist. Understanding then that the beast does not exist
externally but rather within each individual boy, Simon travels to the beach to
tell the others what he has seen. But the others are in the midst of a chaotic
revelry—even Ralph and Piggy have joined Jack’s feast—and when they see Simon’s
shadowy figure emerge from the jungle, they fall upon him and kill him with
their bare hands and teeth.
The following morning, Ralph and Piggy discuss what they
have done. Jack’s hunters attack them and their few followers and steal Piggy’s
glasses in the process. Ralph’s group travels to Jack’s stronghold in an
attempt to make Jack see reason, but Jack orders Sam and Eric tied up and
fights with Ralph. In the ensuing battle, one boy, Roger, rolls a boulder down
the mountain, killing Piggy and shattering the conch shell. Ralph barely
manages to escape a torrent of spears.
Ralph hides for the rest of the night and the following day,
while the others hunt him like an animal. Jack has the other boys ignite the
forest in order to smoke Ralph out of his hiding place. Ralph stays in the
forest, where he discovers and destroys the sow’s head, but eventually, he is
forced out onto the beach, where he knows the other boys will soon arrive to kill
him. Ralph collapses in exhaustion, but when he looks up, he sees a British
naval officer standing over him. The officer’s ship noticed the fire raging in
the jungle. The other boys reach the beach and stop in their tracks at the
sight of the officer. Amazed at the spectacle of this group of bloodthirsty,
savage children, the officer asks Ralph to explain. Ralph is overwhelmed by the
knowledge that he is safe but, thinking about what has happened on the island,
he begins to weep. The other boys begin to sob as well. The officer turns his
back so that the boys may regain their composure.