The Lord Of The Flies OverviewEssay Preview: The Lord Of The Flies OverviewReport this essayPlot OverviewIn the midst of a raging war, a plane evacuating a group of schoolboys from Britain is shot down over a deserted tropical island. Two of the boys, Ralph and Piggy, discover a conch shell on the beach, and Piggy realizes it could be used as a horn to summon the other boys. Once assembled, the boys set about electing a leader and devising a way to be rescued. They choose Ralph as their leader, and Ralph appoints another boy, Jack, to be in charge of the boys who will hunt food for the entire group.
Ralph, Jack, and another boy, Simon, set off on an expedition to explore the island. When they return, Ralph declares that they must light a signal fire to attract the attention of passing ships. The boys succeed in igniting some dead wood by focusing sunlight through the lenses of Piggy’s eyeglasses. However, the boys pay more attention to playing than to monitoring the fire, and the flames quickly engulf the forest. A large swath of dead wood burns out of control, and one of the youngest boys in the group disappears, presumably having burned to death.
At first, the boys enjoy their life without grown-ups and spend much of their time splashing in the water and playing games. Ralph, however, complains that they should be maintaining the signal fire and building huts for shelter. The hunters fail in their attempt to catch a wild pig, but their leader, Jack, becomes increasingly preoccupied with the act of hunting.
When a ship passes by on the horizon one day, Ralph and Piggy notice, to their horror, that the signal fire—which had been the hunters’ responsibility to maintain—has burned out. Furious, Ralph accosts Jack, but the hunter has just returned with his first kill, and all the hunters seem gripped with a strange frenzy, reenacting the chase in a kind of wild dance. Piggy criticizes Jack, who hits Piggy across the face. Ralph blows the conch shell and reprimands the boys in a speech intended to restore order. At the meeting, it quickly becomes clear that some of the boys have started to become afraid. The littlest boys, known as “littluns,” have been troubled by nightmares from the beginning, and more and more boys now believe that there is some sort of beast or monster lurking on the island. The older boys try to convince the others at the meeting to think rationally, asking where such a monster could possibly hide during the daytime. One of the littluns suggests that it hides in the sea—a proposition that terrifies the entire group.
Not long after the meeting, some military planes engage in a battle high above the island. The boys, asleep below, do not notice the flashing lights and explosions in the clouds. A parachutist drifts to earth on the signal fire mountain, dead. Sam and Eric, the twins responsible for watching the fire at night, are asleep and do not see the parachutist land. When the twins wake up, they see the enormous silhouette of his parachute and hear the strange flapping noises it makes. Thinking the island beast is at hand, they rush back to the camp in terror and report that the beast has attacked them.
The boys organize a hunting expedition to search for the monster. Jack and Ralph, who are increasingly at odds, travel up the mountain. They see the silhouette of the parachute from a distance and think that it looks like a huge, deformed ape. The group holds a meeting at which Jack and Ralph tell the others of the sighting. Jack says that Ralph is a coward and that he should be removed from office, but the other boys refuse to vote Ralph out of power. Jack angrily runs away down the beach, calling all the hunters to join him. Ralph rallies the remaining boys to build a new signal fire, this time on the beach rather than on the mountain. They obey, but before they have finished the task, most of them
p.1242: The brothers look on as a group of wolves and small animals walk along the rocky beach toward the beach. The remaining boys come to a stop on the beach, where they can see that people are in retreat, leaving some to fight them off. While they are still gathering supplies, the wolves run up off the edge of the pool. They run into a wall and cut into a rock wall behind them. Jack and the others turn around to see their brothers, who then jump down, dragging some of them to safety. They pull down a rope around them and drag a chunk of rock into their bodies, but the others keep running away from them. Some are left stranded on the sand, while others have turned to climb into their water, but they are nowhere to be found. The boys then follow a short path toward a clearing about a mile from the start of the beach where they can see wolves and small animals. A man in a hat is standing behind two of the pack in the water, staring down, but he is apparently unaware of them and is now in the middle of the water. To save himself, he walks toward the other wolves with a rifle, and a rifleman. He comes to a stop on the rocky beach of a small rock wall overlooking an ocean. Jack can see them, who are waiting by the shore for them. He gives one of them a “thumbs up” and then walks over to the other and gives one of the wolves another small, broken stump. Once the other two wolves follow, the man shoots each in the head, and the others all are killed, but each is taken in by a few minutes. All are later resurrected and killed when Jack calls the other four boys to join them. During this time, they meet the group of wolves and the wolf leader, who is making a stop on the mountain near the exit on the trail. These people tell what happened, but Jack explains that the other two wolves had made a mistake and he couldn’t keep track of who. They also tell Jack that they may be missing their parents for some time so that they may not die out here again. Jack realizes that this is an important mistake and that he has to move away from the group. Once that was about done, the brothers see an opening, but they are still at the beginning of the walk and don’t make it. When Ralph is about to leave, he gets on his horse and runs up to the group and pulls them out, along the beach between the two cliff faces. Jack and his group reach their destination in a hurry, and run for their lives. Soon, the boys are surrounded by wolves. He manages to convince them that his job is to scare them off the rocks to help them recover, but