LOTF Quotes - Themes

Struggle to build a civilization

 “What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?”
o Piggy says this to Ralph during one of their assemblies. Piggy
is consistently in support of keeping a signal fire going, and
concentrating on their rescue. He sees the boys’ potential for
violence long before the others. Here, he pleads with his
listeners to remember their civilization back home, while
articulating a central question of the novel.
 “Jack stood up as he said this, the bloodied knife in his hand. The
two boys faced each other. There was the brilliant world of hunting,
tactics, fierce exhilaration, skill; and there was the world of longing
and baffled commonsense.”
o Throughout the novel Golding suggests that the path to
civilization is more difficult and less likely than the path to
tyranny. Here, Jack and Ralph fight. Jack is described in terms
of his adroitness, Ralph in terms of his shortcomings, and the
ideals he represents are presented as less tangible or
attractive.
 “Bollocks to the rules! We’re strong – we hunt! If there’s a beast,
we’ll hunt it down! We’ll close in and beat and beat and beat - !”
o Jack shouts this to Piggy, who advocates against believing in
the beast, and in maintaining the signal fire. Again, Golding
shows that Jack’s pitch is simple and compelling, while Piggy’s
and Ralph’s is mired in debate and indecision. By offering
simple, brutal solutions and by playing off of the other boys’
fears, Jack positions himself as likely chief.
 “’We’ve got to have special people for looking after the fire. Any
day there may be a ship out there… and if we have a signal going
they’ll come and take us off. And another thing. We ought to have
more rules. Where the conch is, that’s a meeting. The same up here
as down there.”
o Ralph sets up his society with the express mission of looking
to the future, and focusing on the boys’ safety, by way of
 shelter, and rescue. This need for rules, and constant
decision-making, proves untenable for the boys, who
gravitate toward authoritarianism throughout the novel.

Man’s inherent evil

 “Maybe there is a beast… Maybe it’s only us.”
o While the other boys are afraid of a sea monster or some
winged creature, Simon meditates on the metaphysical
nature of the beast, wondering if they should fear their own
natures instead of some outside force. Simon predicts that
there is a darkness lurking in the hearts of the boys on the
island and rejects the notion of a beast.
 “Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!...
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 what they are?”
o The Lord of the Flies says this to Simon when he is isolated, in
the woods. The Lord of the Flies confirms Simon’s theory
about the beast, explaining that the darkness that is within
human beings can’t be killed. Here, Golding uses dialogue to
point to his larger allegory, to answer “why things are what
they are.”
 “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.”
o Jack relishes what he feels after a particularly satisfying hunt.
Here, Golding makes a connection between Jack’s thrill of the
hunt and his desire to commit violence. Even at the first
assembly, Jack is obsessed with the idea of hunting, which,
Golding suggests, betrays his desire to take life.

2
The dangers of mob mentality
 “Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Spill her blood.”
o Immediately after their first successful hunt, Jack’s hunters
chant as a group, showing that they prefer to enact violence
as a mob, rather than as individuals. Their chanting shows
their cohesion, and their delight over killing becomes
ritualistic.
 “Simon was crying out something about a dead man on a hill… The
sticks fell and the mouth of the new circle crunched and screamed.
The beast was on its knees in the center, its arms folded over its
face. It was crying out against the abominable noise, something
about a body on the hill… At once the crowd surged after it, poured
down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore.”
o This quote suggests otherwise moral beings will subject
themselves to immorality for the purpose of joining a group.
When Simon is murdered, the boys think that he is the beast,
and enable each other to believe this fantasy. Again, they kill
as a mob, nobody stepping in to disrupt the collective fantasy
or prevent injustice.
 “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.”
o If most of the boys are vulnerable to the attractions of being
part of a group, Piggy is firmly independent. His lack of
physical prowess and his tendency toward thoughtfulness
make him a bad fit for mob mentality. His virtues – wisdom,
patience, goodness – are not immediately apparent or
attractive to the rest of the boys.
 “Memory of the dance that none of them had attended shook all
four boys convulsively.”
o After Simon is killed, Piggy, Samneric, and Ralph, all struggle
with what they saw. Only Ralph is able to correctly remember
it as murder. The other boys pretend they didn’t see it, or
that they weren’t there, or that it was an accident. This kind
of willful ignorance and delusion enables mobs to behave
brutally or immorally.

3
  “… the mask was a thing on its own, behind which Jack hid,
liberated from shame and self-consciousness.”
o In order for the boys to commit violence, they need to
subjugate their individual morality, and senses of shame to
the will of the group. Golding reflects the psychology of mob
mentality here, showing that Jack uses his facepaint to silence
the good in him, and enable him to be ruthless and
shameless.

War, and the future of mankind

 “So they had shifted camp then, away from the beast. As Simon
thought this, he turned to the poor broken thing that sat stinking by
his side. The beast was harmless and horrible; and the news must
reach the others as soon as possible.”
o Simon discovers that what they thought was the beast is only
a dead paratrooper. This beast is both “harmless and
horrible,” which points to the fact that, while it is no fanged
monster like the boys thought, it’s still a threat as a reminder
of the instability and violence that exists in the world beyond
the island.
 “Didn’t you hear what the pilot said? About the atom bomb?
They’re all dead.”
o Golding places the action of his novel directly after a
detonation of an atomic bomb. By doing this, he ties his story
to real geopolitical problems, making his story a prediction of
what future societies would look like after global war. The
boys are unable to rebuild civilization, and fall quickly into
savagery.
 “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.”

4
 o The novel ends with Ralph’s hopes for fairness and civility
destroyed, as he realizes that what he experienced on the
island betrayed something fundamental about the darkness
inherit to all mankind. He rightly realizes that people like
Piggy – individuals averse to violence, and prone to
thoughtfulness – have no place in any future social order. This
is why Ralph weeps: because what he saw on the island was a
microcosm of the world at large.