The Beast

• The Beast from the water: 

  One boy claims that the beast came out of the sea. 

  The fear of sea-monsters is archetypal, and perhaps reflects our fear of the unknown… 
• The Snake thing: 

  Notice that the beast is first described as a “snake thing”. 

  In Christian imagery, the serpent is often used to personify evil: the Devil takes the form of a serpent to tempt Eve in the book of Genesis. 

   
• The Beast from the air: 

  On one level, the “Beast” does not exist.  It is merely a dead parachutist, ejected from a plane which was shot down.  As the wind catches his parachute, his body sits up, so that he appears to move of his own accord… 
• On a deeper level, as Simon realises, the Beast is within all human beings: we all have the potential to do evil. 

  In Christian theology, this is known as original sin – the idea is that we are all born with the inclination to do wrong. 
• William Golding was writing at a time when it was fashionable to write about the evil in human beings: the Second World War had not long finished, the atomic bombs had been exploded, and everyone now knew about the Nazi death camps. 
• The novel is named after Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies, the demon of gluttony. 
• Jack impales a pig’s head on a stick as an object for the hunters to worship: it becomes the Lord of the Flies, and flies are literally attracted to it.  It can be seen as a symbol of the Beast within us. 
• The way the hunters descend into savagery is also suggesting that the suppressed Beast within them is coming out of hiding.
• Beast (chapter references): 

  2:     first mentioned as ‘snake thing’ 

  5:     spoken of again; Jack says it doesn’t exists; Simon says it’s within them 

  6:     dead parachutist mistaken for beast 

  7:     the boys hunt for the beast 

  8:    Simon speaks to the Lord of the Flies 
• The beast is initially a figment of the littluns' imaginations (a snake things, possibly connoting evil) but takes on a physical form when the dead parachutist lands on the island.
• Simon is the only boy to realise the beast is a symbol of evil and darkness within humanity and cannot be destroyed.
• 'He wants to know what you're going to do about the snake thing' ch2
• 'In the morning, it turned into them things like ropes in the trees' ch2
• 'Snakes were not mentioned now, were not mentionable' ch3
• 'My hunters sometimes - talk of a thing, a dark thing, a beast, some sort of animal' (Jack, ch5)
• 'I saw something moving among the trees, something horrid' (Phil, ch5)
• 'What I mean is... maybe it's only us [the beast]' (Simon, ch5)
• 'But a sign came down from the world of grown-ups, though at the time there was no child awake to read it' ch6
• 'It was furry... there were eyes.. teeth.. claws' (Sam, ch6)
• 'The beast was harmless and horrible' ch9