The Lord of the Flies

“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 what they are?” – Chapter 8, ‘Gift for the Darkness’, The Lord of the Flies, William Golding.

The Beast, the man. The veneer that separates us from the animals is very very thin indeed!!(my friend Jeeves, had this to say about the veneer, “yeah the veneer is very thin !! Dangerously thin !! But you know what, the very thing that makes this veneer thin is the veneer itself !! Well I guess its like saying you are going to die because you are alive :/ !!”) The animals don’t hunt for pleasure or the blood lust, but for us? The hunt is as much pleasurable or at times even more so than the feast after! The red rage that descends over us at times that we care a damn about the implications, the haze that makes the analytical portion of our mind take a hike giving in to that animalistic craving, that urge to annihilate and sheer and tear and rip apart the focus of our displeasure. What makes us keep that in check and what makes us lose it and blunder away into savagery and butchery?

The book says that its society that acts as a leash on our barbaric behavior and once we know that we are not under the watchful eye of a “better” we resort to “uncivilized” behavior. Take picking your nose for example. It is considered impolite and extremely disgusting to do that in public, but in the confines of our bathroom or elsewhere in the house, if nobody is around, don’t we go a’ digging up the canals in search of those moist greenish morsels? Give the piece a once over, studying its texture and consistency before wiping it off on the underside of your chair or your bed?

This is how it all starts.

When left alone in the absence of a society, given a chance to come up with a social structure of our own, do you think we would still adhere to those “quintessential points of living well” that is imposed on us by some blokes who think they know how to lead OUR lives? If there were one such in this imaginary island, don’t you think he/she would be the first to be sacrificed to the “Lord of the Flies”?

The name “Lord of the Flies”, insects that we associate with filth and rot, taking on a place of worship with the boys is a symbolism in itself. Giving us a hint of what to expect when the society, as we know of seizes to exist. The ease with which the hunters adapt to the forests. Critics say that the first successful pig hunt cemented the rift between the two warring factions, but for me it was the killing of the sow with her little piglets nursing at her teats. The first one was more of a fluke and the hunters just wanted to kill the pig and be done with it. But, with the sow, the hunters were getting more pleasure out of the bloody act, they realized that they were enjoying themselves, that’s when they understood the power that they had to take a life, and the way that they take it. Nothing explains this better than Roger’s double sided stake. That stake up her arse and the way it is described in the book,

Here, struck down by the heat, the sow fell and the hunters hurled themselves on her. This dreadful eruption from an unknown world made her frantic; she squealed and bucked and the air was full of sweat and noise and blood and terror. Roger ran round the heap, prodding with his spear whenever pigflesh appeared. Jack was on top of the sow, stabbing downward with his knife. Roger found a lodgement for his point and began to push until he was leaning with his whole weight. The spear moved forward inch by inch and the terrified squealing became a high- pitched scream. Then Jack found the throat and the hot blood spouted over his hands. The sow collapsed and they were heavy and fulfilled upon her. – Chapter 8, ‘Gift for the Darkness’, The Lord of the Flies, William Golding.

I must admit, you could almost feel the resistance against the stick as Roger leans on it and the walls of her entrails tearing apart giving the stick the right of passage inch by bloody inch. You can feel it both as the stick and as the sow and you know what? It seems probable and in a right frame of mind, feels fine. There are theories that this particular paragraph has some sexual connotations too and the satiation that the boys feel after, given their adolescent frame of mind, goes on to partially prove it.

The thing that perhaps hit closest to home for me was the theft of Piggy’s glasses. Piggy - myopic, clever, sensible and the only one with a slight hint of the adult conscience in the group. In many of my previous posts I’ve voiced my fear of the “blurry” and never was the fear more alive than when I was reading the part where Piggy was crouching by the rocks while Ralph was talking with Jack. I keep imagining how Piggy would have felt about the device that executed his death. He would have heard nothing but the rumbling of the rock, he could have made out a vague shape trundling down, but did he realize the enormity of the rock or the lack there of? Was myopia a boon for him that he couldn’t see his death, or was it a curse because his imagination was running wild with fantastic visions of torture? Did he see the haziness of his death in tones of gray in front of his eyes or in gaudier shades of crimson in the clearer eyes of his mind?

At least it was a swifter and quicker death as compared to Simon’s. Simon, the taciturn introvert, the one with the nose bleeds and the stage fears, the boy with whom the Lord of the Flies held his palaver listed in the beginning of this post. The boy who perhaps came close enough to really understanding the Beast and who had to be killed for the same reason. Did the Beast, which was actually the collective barbaric conscience of the group of boys, cloud the judgment of the ones atop the mountain such that what they saw was “The Beast from the Air” and not Simon? Did the conscience see the boy as a threat to its indulgence and existence and hence had to expunge the same? Is it possible for the unconscious self inside each one of us all to somehow make the conscious part of us myopic to what really is and show what really isn’t, which can be construed as a threat?

The “littluns”, the nonchalant way in which they are handled throughout the book, how they are likened to the piglets, and how easy a target they make for the hunters, how the big’uns taunt and tease and hurt the littluns. If the boys had not been rescued by the naval ship, if Ralph had been killed and beheaded as planned, wouldn’t the hunters have turned cannibalistic eventually? Finding it easier to run down and kill the kids, finding their human screams more satiating than the inhuman squeals of the pigs and finally when all the littluns have been “sacrificed” turning on each other and butchering each other when at last nothing remains in the island but the Beast itself, bloated, having had its fill of the fear, the rage, the madness, the butchery and the violence, gloating in its victory and plotting its next move.

Can we stop this Beast?