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a stick sharpened at both ends.) The pig's head is impaled on the stick; ". . . the head hung there, a little blood dribbling down the stick. Instinctively the boys drew back too; and the forest was very still. They listened, and the loudest noise was the buzzing of flies over the spilled guts." Jack offers this grotesque trophy to "the Beast," the terrible animal that the littler children had been dreaming of, and which seems to be lurking on the island wherever they were not looking. The entire incident forms a horrid parody of an Oedipal wedding night; these emotions, the sensations aroused by murder and death, and the overpowering and unaccustomed emotions of sexual love experienced by the half-grown boys, plus their own irrational fears and blind terrors, release the forces of death and the devil on the island.

After this occurs the most deeply symbolic incident in the book, the "interview" of Simon, an embryo mystic, with the head. The head seems to be saying, to Simon's heightened perceptions, that "everything was a bad business. . . . The half-shut eyes were dim with the infinite cynicism of adult life." Simon fights with all his feeble power against the message of the head, against the "ancient, inescapable recognition," the recognition of human capacities for evil and the superficial nature of human moral systems. It is the knowledge of the end of innocence, for which Ralph is to weep at the close of the book. "'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 echoes 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?'"

At the end of this fantastic scene Simon imagines he is looking into a vast mouth. "There was blackness within, a blackness that spread. . . . Simon was inside the mouth. He fell down and lost consciousness." This mouth, * the symbol of ravenous, unreasoning and eternally insatiable nature, appears again in PINCHER MARTIN, in which the development of the theme of a Nature inimical to the conscious personality of man is developed in a stunning fashion. In LORD OF THE FLIES, however, only the outline of a philosophy is sketched, and the boys of the island are figures in a parable or fable which like all great parables or fables reveals to the reader an intimate, disquieting connection between the innocent, time-passing, story-telling aspect of its surface and the great, "dimly appreciated" depths of its interior.

((* cf. Conrad's "Heart of Darkness": "I saw (the dying Kurtz) open his mouth wide--it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him." Indeed Golding seems very close to Conrad, both in basic principles and in artistic method.))

--E. L. Epstein

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE The Sound of the Shell

CHAPTER TWO Fire on the Mountain

CHAPTER THREE Huts on the Beach

CHAPTER FOUR Painted Faces and Long Hair

CHAPTER FIVE Beast from Water

CHAPTER SIX Beast from Air

CHAPTER SEVEN Shadows and Tall Trees

CHAPTER EIGHT Gift for the Darkness

CHAPTER NINE A View to a Death

CHAPTER TEN The Shell and the Glasses

CHAPTER ELEVEN Castle Rock

CHAPTER TWELVE Cry of the Hunters