Lord Of The Flies key quotes

• the long scar smashed into the jungle was a bath of heat: 'Narrator'
• Crash site description


  • Personification - the island has been 'scarred' or permanently defaced
  • Extreme violence - 'smashed'
  • Allusion to the Bible - banishment from the Garden of Eden
• Creature


  How Golding introduces the choir boys led by Jack
• Choir boys are described as a 'creature', suggesting they can develop animalistic tendencies and a mob mentality
• Ralph wants to create a smoke signal

  But the boys lose sight of the goal and build a huge fire that burns part of the jungle
• Jack agrees rescue is important

  But he is more interested in hunting and killing a pig
• Dissenting to savagery


  • Memory of rules taught in England initially moderates the boys' behavior
  • Polysyndeton reinforces the ways society tempers our worst tendencies
• Roger's hidden darker or sadistic side gradually emerges as he becomes a hunter
• Fancy thinking the beast was something you could hunt and kill: 'Simon'
• The Lord of the Flies

  Another name for the devil, representing the evil within us
• The boys chant 'Kill the beast'


  1. They confuse Simon with the beast and kill him

  2. They murder Piggy in a conscious and cold-blooded way
• Piggy's death represents the triumph of savagery over rationality and cooperation
• The twins realize the threat posed by Jack and Roger


  They are now frightened of them
• 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: 'Narrator'
• The moral is not that all humans are savage, but that we all have the capacity for savagery, which we must resist