nnocence and the darkness of man's heart, which was what I was getting at. That's half the answer. The other answer is that if, as in that quotation there, the book is supposed to show how the detects of society are directly traceable to the defects of the individual, then you rub that awful moral lesson in much more by having an ignorant, innocent adult come to the island and say, "Oh, you've been having fun, haven't you?" Then in the last sentence you let him turn away and look at the cruiser, and of course the cruiser, the adult thing, is doing exactly what the hunters do-that is, hunting down and destroying the enemy-so that you say, in effect, to your reader, "Look, you think you've been reading about little boys, but in fact you've been reading about the distresses and the wickednesses of humanity. If this is a gimmick, I still approve of it. Q.: I think it fulfills what you said about the use of the gimmick at the end of a novel, making a reader go back and take another look at things. Did the work by Richard Hughes, High Wind in Jamaica, have any influence on your writing Lord of the Flies? A.: This is an interesting question. I can answer it simply: I've read this book and I liked it but I read it after I'd written Lord of the Flies. And if you're going to come around to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, I might as well confess I've never read that. Q.: Then if you hadn't read High Wind in Jamaica until you'd written Lord of the Flies, how do you feel about the thematic presentation, the parallel between the two works? A.: There is a parallel, I think, but like so many literary parallels it's the plain fact that if people engage in writing about humanity, they're likely in certain circumstances io see something the same thing. They're both looking, after all at the same object, so it would really be very surprising if there weren't literary parallels to be drawn between this book and that.  Q.: I have one more question about Lord of the Flies. Mr. Epstein talks about sex symbols in this work.6 You have recently said that you purposely left man and woman off of the island to remove the ... A.: Remove the "red herring." Q.: Yes. I wonder if you concur with Mr. Epstein's observations. A.: You're probably thinking of the moment when they kill apig . . . Q.: Yes. A.: And I'm assured that this is a sexual symbol and it has affinities of the Oedipadian wedding night. What am I to say to this? I suppose the only thing I can really say is there are in those circumstances, after all, precious few ways of killing a pig. The same thing's just as true of the Oedipadian wedding night. 6.See below, p. 279.-Eds. The Meaning of It All1 Broadcast on the BBC Third Programme, August 28, 1959 KERMODE: I should like to begin, Golding, by talking about an article on your work which I know you liked which appeared in the Kenyon Review2 about a year ago in which he says many admiring things about all your books but introduces a distinction between fable and fiction and puts you very much on the fable side, arguing, for example, that in Lord of the Flies you incline occasionally not to give a full-body presentation of people living and behaving, so much as an illustration of a particular theme; would you accept this as a fair comment on your work? GOLDING: Well, what I would regard as a tremendous compliment to myself would be if someone would substitute the word "myth" for "fable" because I think a myth is a much profounder and more significant thing than a fable. I do feel fable as being an invented thing on the surface whereas myth is something which comes out from the roots of things in the ancient sense of being the key to existence, the whole meaning of life, and experience as a whole. KERMODE: You're not primarily interested in giving the sort of body and pressure of lived life in a wide society; obviously not, because all your books have been concerned with either persons or societies, unnaturally isolated in some sense. It is legitimate to assume from that that you are concerned with people in this kind of extremity of solitariness. 1.The following interview was reprinted in this form in Books and Bookmen, 5 (October, 1959), 9-10, and is printed in part here by permission of Frank Kermode and William Golding. 2.John Peter, "The Fables of William Golding," Kentyon Re-view, 19 (Autumn, 1957), 577-592. Reprinted below, pp. 229-234.-Eds. GOLDING: Well, no, I don't think it is legitimate. My own feeling about it is that their isolation is a convenient one, rather than an unnatural one. Do you see what I mean? KERMODE: Yes, I do see, but I'm not sure about the word "convenient" here. Convenient to you because you want to treat boys in the absence of grown-ups, is this what you mean? GOLDING: Yes, I suppose so. You see it depends how far you regard intentions as being readable. Now, you know and I know about teaching people; we both do it as our daily bread. Well, you see, perhaps, people who are not quite as immature as those I see, but my own immature boys I watch carefully and there does come a point which is very legible in their society at which you can see all those things (as shown in Lord of the Flies) are within a second of being carried out-it's the master who gets the right boy by the scruff of the neck and hauls him back. He is God who stops a murder being committed. KERMODE: Yes, this is why one of your boys, Piggy, often refers to the absence of grown-ups as the most important conditioning factor in the situation. The argument is, then, that out of a human group of this kind, the human invention of evil will proceed, provided that certain quite arbitrary checks are not present GOLDING: Yes, I think so; I think that the arbitrary checks that you talk about are nothing but the fruit of bitter experience of people who are adult enough to realise, "Well, I, I myself am vicious and would like to kill that man, and he is vicious and would like to kill me, and therefore, it is sensible that we should both have an arbitrary scheme of things in which three other people come in and separate us." KERMODE: This makes it interesting, I think, to consider the place among your boys of the boy, Simon, in Lord of the Flies, who is different from the others and who understands something like the situation you're describing. He understands, for example, that the evil that the boys fear, the beast they fear, is substantially of their own invention, but when, in fact, he announces this, he himself is regarded as evil and killed accordingly. Are we allowed to infer from your myth that there will always be a person of that order in a group, or is this too much? GOLDING: It is, I think, a bit unfair not so much because it isn't germane, but simply because it brings up too much. You see, I think on the one hand that it is true that there will always be people who will see something particularly clearly, and will not be listened to, and if they are a particularly outstanding example of their sort, will probably be killed for it. But, on the other hand, that in itself brings up such a vast kind of panorama. What so many intelligent people and particularly, if I may say so, so may literary people find, is that Simon is incomprehensible. But, he is comprehensible to the illiterate person. The illiterate person knows about saints and sanctity, and Simon is a saint.3 KERMODE: Yes, well he's a land of scapegoat, I suppose, GOLDING: No, I won't agree. You are really flapping a kind of Golden Bough over me, or waving it over my head, but I don't agree. You see, a saint isn't just a scapegoat, a saint is somebody who in the last analysis voluntarily embraces his fate, which is a pretty sticky one, and he is for the illiterate a proof of the existence of God because the illiterate person who is not brought up on logic and not brought up always to hope for the worst says, "Well, a person like this cannot exist without a good God." Therefore the illiterate person finds Simon extremely easy to understand, someone who voluntarily embraces this beast goes . . . and tries to get rid of him and goes to give the good news to the ordinary bestial man on the beach, and gets killed for it. KERMODE: Yes, but may I introduce the famous Lawrence caveat here, "Never trust the teller, trust the tale"? GOLDING: Oh, that's absolute nonsense. But of course the man who tells the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature, dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth. 3.Compare the following remarks with Donald R. Spangler's essay "Simon" on pp. 211-215 in this volume.-Eds. KERMODE: Well, I don't think it's necessary to state it quite so extremely. What I had in mind here was simply that Simon in fact is coming down from the top of the hill where he's seen the dead body of the parachutist, in order to tell the other people that all is well. He's not embracing his faith which is to be killed by the other people; he thinks he's going to put them right. GOLDING: Ah, well, that's again a question of scale, isn't ft? The point was that out of all the people on that island who would ascend the mountain, Simon was the one who saw it was the thing to do, and actually did it; nobody else dared. That is embracing your fate, you see. KERMODE: Ah, yes, without really any sense that what will happen in the end is that he shall become the beast, which is what he does. COLDINC: No, he doesn't become the beast, he becomes the beast in other people's opinions. KERMODE: He becomes the beast in the text also: "The beast was on its knees in the centre, its arms folded over its face." Of course, you're here reporting what the boys in their orgiastic fury thought Simon was, but I should have said that that way of reporting allows a certain ambiguity of interpretation here, which you cannot, in fact, deny us. GOLDING: I thought of it myself originally, I think, as a metaphor-the kind of metaphor of existence if you like, and the dead body on the mountain I thought of as being history, as the past. There's a point a couple of chapters before where these children on the island have got themselves into a hell of a mess, they're-it's the things that have crawled out of their own bones and their own veins, they don't know whether it's a beast from sky, air or where it's coming but there's something terrible about it as one of the conditions of existence. At the moment when they're all most anguished they say, "If only grown-ups could get a sign to us, if only they could tell us what's what"-and what happens is that a dead man comes out of the sky. Now that is not God being dead, as some people have said, that is history. He's dead, but he won't lie clown. All that we can give our children is to pass on to them this distressing business of a United States of Europe, which won't work, because we all grin at each other across borders and so on and so forth. And if you turn round to your parents and say "Please help me," they are really part of the old structure, the old system, the old world, which ought to be good but at the moment is making the world and the air more and more radioactive. KERMODE: I find it's extraordinarily interesting to think of that explanation in connection with the Ballantyne4 treatment of the same theme. I don't know whether you would like to say just how far and how ironically we ought to treat this connection. COLDING: Well, I think, fairly deeply, but again, not ironically in the bad sense, but in almost a compassionate sense. You see, really, I'm getting at myself in this. What I'm saying to myself is, "Don't be such a fool, you remember when you were a boy, a small boy, how you lived on that island with Ralph and Jack and Peterkin" 5 (who is Simon, by the way, Simon called Peter, you see. It was worked out very carefully in every possible way, this novel). I said to myself finally, "Now you are grown up, you are adult; it's taken you a long time to become adult, but now you've got there you can see that people are not like that; they would not behave like that if they were God-fearing English gentlemen, and they went to an island like that." Their savagery would not be found in natives on an island. As like as not they would find savages who were kindly and uncomplicated and that the devil would rise out of the intellectual complications of the three white men on the island itself. It is really a pretty big connection [with Ballantyne]. KERMODE: In fact it's a kind of black mass version of Ballantyne, isn't it? GOLDING: Well, I don't really think I ought to accept that. But I think I see what you mean. No, no, I disagree with ft entirely, I think it is in fact a realistic view of the Ballantyne situation. 4.R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island was published in 1857 in England. See Carl Niemeyer's "The Coral Island Revisited," College English, 22 (January, 1961), 241-245. Reprinted in this volume on pp. 217-223.-Eds. 5.Characters in The Coral Island.-Eds. The Novels of William Golding] FRANK KERMODE Lord of the Flies has "a pretty big connection" with Ballantyne.2 In The Cored Island Ralph, Jack and Peterkin are cast away on a desert island, where they live active, civilised, and civilising lives. Practical difficulties are easily surmounted; they light fires with bowstrings and spy-glasses, hunt pigs for food, and kill them with much ease and a total absence of guilt-indeed of bloodshed. (They are all Britons-a term they use to compliment each other-all brave, obedient and honourable.) There is much useful information conveyed concerning tropical islands, including field-workers' reporting of the conduct of cannibals: but anthropology is something nasty that clears up on the arrival of a missionary, and Jack himself prevents an act of cannibalism by telling the flatnoses not to be such blockheads and presenting them with six newly slaughtered pigs. The parallel between the island and the Earthly Paradise causes a trace of literary sophistication: "Meat and drink on the same tree! My dear boys, we're set up for life; it must be the ancient paradise-hurrah! . . . We afterwards found, however, that these lovely islands were very unlike Paradise in many things." But these "things" are non-Christian natives and, later, pirates; the boys themselves are 1.This selection is taken from a longer essay that appeared in the International Literary Annual, III (1961), 11-29, and is reprinted by permission of John Calder Limited. 2. The relationship of R. M. Ballantyne's novel The Coral Island to Lord of the Flies is taken up by Carl Niemeyer, "The Coral Island Revisited," reprinted on pp. 217-223 in this volume. See also the Foreword to this volume.-Eds. cleanly (cold baths recommended) and godly-regenerate, empire-building boys, who know by instinct how to turn paradise into a British protectorate. The Coral Island could be used as a document in the history of ideas; it belongs inseparably to the period when boys were sent out of Arnoldian schools certified free of Original Sin. Golding takes Ralph, Jack and Peterkin (altering this name to Simon "called Peter")3 and studies them against an altered moral landscape. He is a schoolmaster, and knows boys well enough to make their collapse into savagery plausible, to see them as cannibals; the authority of the grown-ups is all there is to prevent savagery. If you dropped these boys into an Earthly Paradise "they would not behave like God-fearing English gentlemen" but "as like as not . . . find savages who were kindly and uncomplicated. . . . The devil would rise out of the intellectual complications of the three white men." Golding leaves the noble savages out of Lord of the Flies, but this remark is worth quoting because it states the intellectual position in its basic simplicity. It is the civilised who are corrupt, out of phase with natural rhythm. Their guilt is the price of evolutionary success; and our awareness of this fact can be understood by duplicating Ballantyne's situation, borrowing his island, and letting his theme develop in this new and more substantial context. Once more every prospect pleases; but the vileness proceeds, not from cannibals, but from the boys, though Man is not so much vile as "heroic and sick." Unlike Ballantyne's boys, these are dirty and inefficient; they have some notion of order, symbolised by the beautiful conch which heralds formal meetings; but when uncongenial effort is required to maintain it, order disappears. The shelters are inadequate, the signal fire goes out at the very moment when Jack first succeeds in killing a pig. Intelligence fades; irrational taboos and blood rituals make hopeless the task of the practical but partial intellect of Piggy; his glasses, the firemakers, are smashed and stolen, and in the end he himself is broken to pieces as he holds the conch. When civilised conditioning fades-how tedious Piggy's appeal to what adults might do or think!-the children are capable of neither savage nor civil gentleness. Always a 3. It is interesting to ask why Golding changed the name. See the Foreword to this volume.-EDS. little nearer to raw humanity than adults, they slip into a condition of animality depraved by mind, into the cruelty of hunters with their devil-liturgies and torture: they make an unnecessary, evil fortress, they steal, they abandon all operations aimed at restoring them to civility. Evil is the natural product of their consciousness. First, the smallest boys create, a beastie, a snake-"as if it wasn't a good island." Then a beast is created in good earnest, and defined in a wonderful narrative sequence. The emblem of this evil society is the head of a dead pig, fixed, as a sacrifice, on the end of a stick and animated by flies and by the imagination of the voyant, Simon. Simon is Golding's first "saint, and a most important figure." He is for the illiterate a proof of the existence of God because the illiterate (to whom we are tacitly but unmistakably expected to attribute a correct insight here) will say, "Well, a person like this cannot exist without a good God." For Simon "voluntarily embraces the beast . . . and tries to get rid of him." What he understands-and this is wisdom Golding treats with awe-is that evil is "only us." He climbs up to where the dead fire is dominated by the beast, a dead airman in a parachute, discovers what this terrible thing really is, and rushes off with the good news to the beach, where the maddened boys at their beast-slaying ritual mistake Simon himself for the beast and kill him. As Piggy, the dull practical intelligence, is reduced to blindness and futility, so Simon, the visionary, is murdered before he can communicate his comfortable knowledge.4 Finally, the whole Paradise is destroyed under the puzzled eyes of an adult observer. Boys will be boys. The difference of this world from Ballantyne's simpler construction from similar materials is not merely a matter of incomparability of the two talents at work; our minds have, in general, darker needs and obscurer comforts. It would be absurd to suppose that the change has impoverished us; but it has seemed to divide our world into "two cultures"-the followers of Jack and the admirers of Simon, those who build fortresses and those who want to name the beast. 4.Cf. Donald R. Soangler's "Simon" on pp. 211-215 in this volume and also Golding's remarks on Simon in the interview with James Keating, p. 192.-Eds. Lord of the Flies "was worked out carefully in every possible way,"5 and its author holds that the "programme" of the book is its meaning. He rejects Lawrence's doctrine, "Never trust the artist, trust the tale" and its consequence, "the proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist." He is wrong, I think; insofar as the book differs from its programme there is, as a matter of common sense, material over which the writer has no absolute authority. This means not only that there are possible readings which he cannot veto, but even that some of his own views on the book may be in a sense wrong. The interpretation of the dead parachutist is an example. This began in the "programme" as straight allegory; Golding says that this dead man "is" History.6 "All that we can give our children" in their trouble is this monstrous dead adult, who's "dead, but won't lie down"; an ugly emblem of war and decay that broods over the paradise and provides the only objective equivalent for the beasts the boys imagine. Now this limited allegory (I may even have expanded it in the telling) seems to me not to have got out of the "programme" into the book; what does get in is more valuable because more like myth- capable, that is, of more various interpretation than the rigidity of Golding's scheme allows. And in writing of this kind all depends upon the author's mythopoeic power to transcend the "programme." 5.Golding makes this statement in the interview with Frank Kermode, The Meaning of It All." See above, p. 201.-Eds. 6.In the interview "The Meaning of It All," p. 200.-Eds. Introduction1 E. M. FORSTER It is a pleasure and an honour to write an introduction to this remarkable book, but there is also a difficulty, for the reason that the book contains surprises, and its reader ought to encounter them for himself. If he knows too much he will lean back complacently. And complacency is not a quality that Mr. Golding values. The universe, in his view, secretes something that we do not expect and shall probably dislike, and he here presents the universe, under the guise of a school adventure story on a coral island. How romantically it starts! Several bunches of boys are being evacuated during a war. Their plane is shot down, but the "tube" in which they are packed is released, falls on an island, and having peppered them over the jungle slides into the sea. None of them are hurt, and presently they collect and prepare to have a high old time. A most improbable start But Mr. Golding's magic is already at work and he persuades us to accept it. And though the situation is improbable the boys are not. He understands them thoroughly, partly through innate sympathy, partly because he has spent much of his Me teaching. He makes us feel at once that we are with real human beings, even if they are small ones, and thus lays a solid foundation for the horrors to come. Meet three boys. Ralph is aged a little over twelve. He is fair and well built, might grow into a boxer but never into a devil, for he 1. Mr. Forster's Introduction appears in Lord of the Flies, New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1962. It is reprinted here by permission of the publisher. is sunny and decent, sensible, considerate. He doesn't understand a lot, but has two things clear: firstly, they will soon be rescued-why, his daddy is in the Navy!-and secondly, until they are rescued they must hang together. It is he who finds the conch and arranges that when there is a meeting he who holds the conch shall speak. He is chosen as leader. He is democracy. And as long as the conch remains, there is some semblance of cooperation. But it gets smashed. Meet Piggy. Piggy is stout, asthmatic, shortsighted, underprivileged and wise. He is the brains of the party. It is the lenses of his spectacles that kindle fire. He also possesses the wisdom of the heart. He is loyal to Ralph, and tries to stop him from making mistakes, for he knows where mistakes may lead to in an unknown island. He knows that nothing is safe, nothing is neatly ticketed. He is the human spirit, aware that the universe has not been created for his convenience,2 and doing the best he can. And as long as he survives there is some semblance of intelligence. But he too gets smashed. He hurtles through the air under a rock dislodged by savages. His skull cracks and his brains spill out. Meet Jack. Jack is head of a choir-a bizarre assignment considering his destiny. He marches them two and two up the sundrenched beach. He loves adventure, excitement, foraging in groups, orders when issued by himself, and though he does not yet know it and shrinks from it the first time, he loves shedding blood. Ralph he rather likes, and the liking is mutual. Piggy he despises and insults. He is dictatorship versus democracy. It is possible to read the book at a political level, and to see in its tragic trend the tragedy of our inter-war world. There is no doubt as to whose side the author is on here. He is on Ralph's. But if one shifts the 2.While there is no question as to Piggy's intelligence, one must not overestimate the range of his awareness. His physical deficiencies suggest the weakness in his point of view. Piggy denies the existence of the beast and insists that "life is scientific"; even after the triumph of the hunters, he expects to enter Jack's fortress and reason with him for return or the bifocals. Like all of Golding's rationalists, Piggy has a one-dimensional view of human nature: he fails to perceive "the darkness of man's heart."-Eds. vision to a still deeper level-the psychological-he is on the side of Piggy. Piggy knows that things mayn't go well because he knows what boys are, and he knows that the island, for all its apparent friendliness, is equivocal. The hideous accidents that promote the reversion to savagery fill most of the book, and the reader must be left to endure them-and also to embrace them, for somehow or other they are entangled with beauty. The greatness of the vision transcends what is visible. At the close, when the boys are duly rescued by the trim British cruiser, we find ourselves on their side. We have shared their experience and resent the smug cheeriness of their rescuers. The naval officer is a bit disappointed with what he finds-everyone filthy dirty, swollen bellies, faces daubed with clay, two missing at least and the island afire. It ought to have been more like Coral Island, he suggests. Ralph looked at him dumbly. For a moment he had a fleeting picture of the strange glamour that had once invested the beaches. But the island was scorched up like dead wood-Simon was dead-and Jack had . , . The tears began to flow and sobs shook him. He gave himself up to them now for the first time on the island; great, shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench his whole body. His voice rose under the black smoke before the burning wreckage of the island; and infected by that emotion, the other little boys began to shake and sob too. And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, 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. This passage-so pathetic-is also revealing. Phrases like "the end of innocence" and "the darkness of man's heart" show us the author's attitude more clearly than has appeared hitherto. He believes in the Fall of Man and perhaps in Original Sin. Or if he does not exactly believe, he fears; the same fear infects his second novel, a difficult and profound work called The Inheritors. Here the innocent (the boys as it were) are Neanderthal Man, and the corrupters are Homo Sapiens, our own ancestors, who eat other animals, discover intoxicants, and destroy. Similar notions occur in his other novels. Thus his attitude approaches the Christian: we are all born in sin, or will all lapse into it. But he does not complete the Christian attitude, for the reason that he never introduces the idea of a Redeemer. When a deity does appear, he is the Lord of the Flies, Beelzebub, and he sends a messenger to prepare his way before him. The approach of doom is gradual. When the little boys land they are delighted to find that there are no grown-ups about. Ralph stands on his head with joy, and led by him they have a short period of happiness. Soon problems arise, work has to be assigned and executed, and Ralph now feels "we must make a good job of this, as grown-ups would, we mustn't let them down." Problems increase and become terrifying. In his desperation the child cries, "If only they could get a message to us, if only they could send us something grown-up ... a sign or something." And they do. They send something grown-up. A dead parachutist floats down from the upper air, where they have been killing each other, is carried this way and that by the gentle winds, and hooks onto the top of the island. This is not the end of the horrors. But it is the supreme irony. And it remains with us when the breezy rescuers arrive at the close and wonder why a better show wasn't put up. Lord of the Flies is a very serious book which has to be introduced seriously. The danger of such an introduction is that it may suggest that the book is stodgy. It is not. It is written with taste and liveliness, the talk is natural, the descriptions of scenery enchanting. It is certainly not a comforting book. But it may help a few grown-ups to be less complacent and more compassionate, to support Ralph, respect Piggy, control Jack and lighten a little the darkness of man's heart. At the present moment (if I may speak personally) it is respect for Piggy that seems needed most I do not find it in our leaders. King's College Cambridge May 14, 1962 Simon1 DONALD R. SPANGLER IN Lord of the Flies the character Simon has about him a general aura of saintliness. Critics have suggested that Simon is a Christ figure. And William Golding, on the artist's part, has said that he intended to present a Christ figure in the novel, intimating that Simon is the character he meant so to present.2 Accordingly, it might be of value to examine what textual evidence there is to document the function of Simon as a Christ or "saint" in Lord of the Flies. Even before identified by name Simon is introduced as the choir boy who had fainted, an oblique bit of characterization that, in retrospect, is seen to have impressed upon the reader the hallucinatory, and hence, mystical-religious proclivities of a boy who is subject to "spells." His name, when we are given it, reveals in its etymology the distinguishing "attunedness" of the mystic-Simon, "the hearkening." And the Mother Goose appellative, simple, hints of the "holy idiot" folk-type. Simon is skinny, a trait that, in a child, suggests the adult correlative of ascetic self-abnegation. A "vivid little boy," his face "glows," radiant after the manner of nimbus and halo. Jungle buds rejected by the others because inedible, Simon's religious imagination sees as "candles." (The buds open at night into aromatic white flowers, whose scent- incense-prayer-and color-white-innocence-confirm the value that he singularly had sensed them to have.)3 And 1. This article was written for this volume. 2.James Keating, "Interview with William Golding," May 10, 1962. See p. 192 in this volume. 3.The buds also appear in Ballantyne's The Coral Island, but significant here is the rejection of them by everyone but Simon. when the lethargic Piggy fails to help gather fire wood, Simon defends him to the others by observing that the fire had been started with Piggy's glasses, that Piggy had "helped that way," a ratiocination on Simon's part the casuistry of which is surely offset by its overriding compassion. In the scene in which Simon "suffers the little children to come unto him," Golding's description unmistakably evokes the Biblical accounts of Christ amid the bread-hungry masses: Then, amid the roar of bees in the afternoon sunlight, Simon found for them the fruit they could not reach, pulled off the choicest from up in the foliage, passed them back down to the endless, outstretched hands. When he had satisfied them he paused and looked round. In this passage and elsewhere Simon's abstinence from eating meat contributes to the impression of his saintliness, particularly since the novel implies that the hunt for meat as food disguises the blood-lust to kill for killing's sake, and further, that carnivorousness is linked with carnality (by the symbolic coitus of the sow killing) ,4 As a repeated object of ridicule, snickered over and laughed at, Simon's predicament recalls the New Testament details of the centurions' mocking of Jesus. And as Golding has pointed out, the Biblical temptation of Christ has its parallel in Lord of the Flies, in the confrontation between the boy and the "beast," between Simon and the sow's head, which tries to while him into complacency. To Ralph, Simon prophesies that, " 'You'll get back where you came from,' " and by excluding himself from the predicted rescue, prophesies in that same breath his own fate, not to be rescued. Not to be rescued is not necessarily to die, but the attendant analogues being what they are, there seems to be a clear correspondence between Simon's foresight and that of Christ, as accounts hold Christ to have anticipated the imminence of his "hour." Images of Gethsemane and Golgotha amass in the description of Simon's agony in his thicket sanctum, transfixed by the impaled head-the apparition of the beast in the 4.Compare E. L. Epstein, "Notes on Lord of the Flies" p. 280 in this volume and, further, Golding's own remarks in the interview with James Keating, p. 195 in this volume.-Eds. forest that induces in Simon his apprehension of the beast in man's heart, the boy-mystic's vision, to paraphrase Richard Wilbur, of how much we are the beast that prowls our woods. The incidents of Simon's kneeling and sweating accord directly with the story of Gethsemane; moreover, Gold-ing's description reinforces those associations by half raising popular pictorial renderings of the person of Jesus and of the Agony in the Garden: Simon kneeling in an "arrow of sun," with "head tilted slightly up," sweat running from his "long, coarse hair." (The deft advantage to which Golding here puts calendar-art graphics is noteworthy.) As the thicket is the setting for incidents that recall Gethsemane, it is the setting also for events that evoke images of Golgotha. Simon falls, in accord with gospel accounts of Jesus' ascent to the cross, and losing consciousness, regains it only after shedding blood, the nosebleed of the boy analogous to the lance-wounding of Jesus in the details of the crucifixion. It is as sacrificial victim, however, that Simon most clearly emerges as a Christ figure. A lad whose feet "left prints in the soil" (the dirt-road treks of the teaching Master?), he is described as "burned by the sun," not tanned to gold like the other boys, but burnt, offering-like. When, after he has received the revelation that the "beast," the "thing" really to fear, is man's nature, it is with Christ-like resignation to inevitability ("What else is there to do?" /"Let Thy will be done.") that Simon sets out to discover what the "beast on the mountain" really is, since it is not a thing to fear. When he finds the body of the chutist and disentangles the lines, Simon is seen as ministering to the dead, committing the body to the earth so that the processes of decomposition can complete the return "to earth." However, because the wind takes hold of the chute and carries off the corpse, Simon becomes the exorcist from the island of the false menace, the mistakenly feared dead man. (Golding recollects in the Keating interview-after explaining that his memory of the novel might be blurred-that Simon releases the body "so that the wind can [italics mine] blow this dead thing away from the island," implying intention on Simon's part.) In any event, Simon's Christ-role is confirmed when, following his discovery that the "beast on the mountain" is only the dead airman, Simon comes down from the mountain-the "heights of truth"-to save the boys from their false fears and to turn their sights inward upon their own behavior, sharing the knowledge that, while the dead are not to be feared, the live are. (It might better be said that, while the dead are not to be feared, the killed are.) The responsibility for the martyrdom of Simon, like the responsibility for that of Jesus, can be ascribed either to secular or sacred interests. At first the tribe maintains that it was not Simon they had killed, but the terrorizing "beast" and Simon is made a scapegoat, the capital-punishment of whom satisfies the established state (the tribe) by eliminating a supposed enemy. Later on the boys admit that it was not the "beast" that they had killed, but Simon, rationalizing that the human sacrifice will finally appease the "beast," which they have been placating with pigs' heads; and Simon is made a human offering, the immolation of whom assuages the established god (the "beast"), the priests of which the "celebrants" of the sacrificial feast become. However, the analogue between Golding's Simon and Christianity's Saviour stops short of soteriology. Only Simon has hearkened. From his life and death no help accrues to that microcosm of humanity, on its island Earth in a space of sea, lost, and in need to be "saved." Upon Golding's Simon Peter no church is founded, no mechanism for salvation. In fact, the implication of the novel is. that the beast in man can never be recognized because it causes imagined "beasts" forever to be misidentified and slain before identified correctly, so that, unrecognized, the beast endures. The beast is man's inability to recognize his own responsibility for his own self-destruction. Of course, what constitutes self-destruction the centuries have quarreled over. (What "good" is really evil, what "evil" really good? Does man destroy himself in being himself, or in trying not to be himself? What is his nature, for him to be guilty in response to, innocent in accord with, or guilty in accord with and innocent in response to? The physics and metaphysics of "self" produce the paradoxes of guilt: does man react to a basically innocent nature with misguided guilt, or react to a basically guilty nature with unrecognizing innocence?) Apollo and Dionysus still wrestle. Nevertheless, whatever in man is to blame, what is to blame is something in man. It is the shifting by man of responsibility onto "beasts" outside himself, his refusal to confront his own nature, that the sow's head symbolizes and Golding excoriates. What finally happens to Simon the saviour the four paragraphs closing Chapter Nine relate, in detailing the disposition of Simon's body. These paragraphs emphasize the material assimilation of the corpse back into the material universe. It is true that the last glimpse Golding provides of the body is that of its drifting "out to sea," in the ancient symbolic act of the soul's "crossing over," but the absence of evidence that Simon is to have a conscious afterlife, that he will remain in any way intact as a person, makes the decorporealization seem very permanent. The body glows ironically, with the luminescence of scavengers, metamorphosing it into the subhuman world of ragged claws. Even as Simon's body is seen, at the close of Chapter Nine, to be a "silver form under the steadfast constellations" (the body to disintegrate, the stars to prevail), the intimations of immortality are quite evanescent. The romantic metaphor of its becoming a star obviates the urgent practicalities of the Christian's "getting into heaven," Simon's soul (breath-spirit) leaves him with a last gruesome "plop." At best the prospect seems to be the certainly non-Christian one of Simon's disembodied spirit's remaining forever disembodied. The drift of these paragraphs of Lord of the Flies seems to counter the Christian anticipation of an eventual hylozoic reunion of human body and soul. And though the reader's sympathies yearn that the beauty of Simon's spirit preclude its extinction, that beauty in the end only makes the oblivion Simon comes to more poignant. The Coral Island Revisited1 CARL NIEMEYER ONE interested in finding out about Golding for oneself should probably begin with Lord of the Flies, now available in a paperback. The story is simple. In a way not clearly explained, a group of children, all boys, presumably evacuees in a future war, are dropped from a plane just before it is destroyed, onto an uninhabited tropical island. The stage is thus set for a reworking of a favorite subject in children's literature: castaway children assuming adult responsibilities without adult supervision. Golding expects his readers to recall the classic example of such a book, R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1857),2 where the boys rise to the occasion and behave as admirably as would adults. But in Lord of the Flies everything goes wrong from the beginning. A few boys representing sanity and common sense, led by Ralph and Piggy, see the necessity for maintaining a signal fire to attract a rescue. But they are thwarted by the hunters, led by red-haired Jack, whose lust for blood is finally not to be satisfied by killing merely wild pigs. Only the timely arrival of a British cruiser saves us from an ending almost literally too horrible to think about Since Golding is using a naive literary form to express sophisticated reflections on the nature of man and society, and since he refers obliquely 1.This article appeared in College English, 22 (January, 1961), 241-45, and is reprinted here in slightly shortened form by permission of the National Council of the Teachers of English and the author. 2.It is worthwhile to compare Frank Kermode's discussion of The Coral Island with Niemeyer's. See "The Novels of William Golding," reprinted in this volume on pp. 203-206. See also the Foreword to this volume.-Eds. to Ballantyne many times throughout the book, a glance at The Coraf Island is appropriate. Ballantyne shipwrecks his three boys-Jack, eighteen; Ralph, the narrator, aged fifteen; and Peterkin Gay, a comic sort of boy, aged thirteen-somewhere in the South Seas on an uninhabited coral island. Jack is a natural leader, but both Ralph and Peterkin have abilities valuable for survival. Jack has the most common sense and foresight, but Peterkin turns out to be a skillful killer of pigs, and Ralph, when later in the book he is temporarily separated from his friends and alone on a schooner, coolly navigates it back to Coral Island by dead reckoning, a feat sufficiently impressive, if not quite equal to Captain Bligh's. The boys' life on the island is idyllic; and they are themselves without malice or wickedness, though there are a few curious episodes in which Ballantyne seems to hint at something he himself understands as little as do his characters. One is Peterkin's wanton killing of an old sow, useless as food, which the boy rationalizes by saying he needs leather for shoes, This and one or two other passages suggest that Ballantyne was aware of some darker aspects of boyish nature, but for the most part he emphasizes the paradisiacal life of the happy castaways. Like Golding's, however, Ballantyne's story raises the problem of evil, but whereas Golding finds evil in the boys own natures, it comes to Ballantyne's boys not from within themselves but from the outside world. Tropical nature, to be sure, is kind, but the men of this non-Christian world are bad. For example, the island is visited by savage cannibals, one canoeful pursuing another, who fight a cruel and bloody battle, observed by the horrified boys, and then go away. A little later the island is again visited, this time by pirates (i.e., white men who have renounced or scorned their Christian heritage), who succeed in capturing Ralph. In due time the pirates are deservedly destroyed, and in the final episode of the book the natives undergo an unmotivated conversion to Christianity, which effects a total change in their nature just in time to rescue the boys from their clutches. Thus Ballantyne's view of man is seen to be optimistic, like his view of English boys' pluck and resourcefulness, which subdues tropical islands as triumphantly as England imposes empire and religion on lawless breeds of men. Colding`s naval officer, the deus ex machine, of Lord of theFlies, is only echoing Ballantyne when, perceiving dimly that all has not gone well on the island, he says (p. 186): "I should have thought that a pack of British boys-you're all British, aren't you?-would have been able to put up a better show than that-I mean-" This is not the only echo of the older book. Golding boldly calls his two chief characters Jack and Ralph. He reproduces the comic Peterkin in the person of Piggy.3 He has a wanton killing of a wild pig, accomplished, as E. L. Epstein points out, "in terms of sexual intercourse."4 He uses a storm to avert a quarrel between Jack and Ralph, as Ballantyne used a hurricane to rescue his boys from death at the hands of cannibals. He emphasizes physical cruelty but integrates it into his story, and by making it a real if deplorable part of human, or at least boyish, nature improves on Ballantyne, whose descriptions of brutality-never of course performed by the boys-are usually introduced merely for their sensational effect. Finally, on the last page Golding's officer calls Ralph mildly to task for not having organized things better. "It was like that at first," said Ralph, "before things-" He stopped. "We were together then-" The officer nodded helpfully. I know. Jolly good show. Like the Coral Island." Golding invokes Ballantyne, so that the kind but uncomprehending adult, the instrument of salvation, may recall to the child who has just gone through hell the naivete of the child's own early innocence, now forever lost; but he suggests at the same time the inadequacy of Ballantyne's picture of human nature in primitive surroundings. Golding, then, regards Ballantyne's book as a badly falsified map of reality, yet the only map of this particular reality that many of us have. Ralph has it and, through harrowing experiences, replaces it with a more accurate one. The naval officer, though he should know better, since he is on 3.Golding has declared that Peterkin of The Coral Island becomes Simon in Lord of the Flies. See Frank Kermode and William Golding, The Meaning of It AH," p. 201.-Eds. 4.E. L. Epstein, "Notes on Lord of the Flies," p. 280 below.- Eds. the scene and should not have to rely on memories of his boyhood reading, has it, and it seems unlikely that he is ever going to alter it, for his last recorded action is to turn away from the boys and look at his "trim" cruiser; in other words to turn away from a revelation of the untidy human heart to look at something manufactured, manageable, and solidly useful. Golding, who being a grammar school teacher should know boys well, gives a corrective of Ballantyne's optimism. As he has explained, the book is "an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature." 5 These defects turn out, on close examination, to result from the evil of inadequacy and mistakenness. Evil is not the positive and readily identifiable force it appears to be when embodied in Ballantyne's savages and pirates. Golding's Ralph, for example, has real abilities, most conspicuous among them the gift of leadership and a sense of responsibility toward the "littluns." Yet both are incomplete. "By now," writes Golding, "Ralph had no self-consciousness in public thinking but would treat the day's decisions as though he were playing chess." Such detachment is obviously an important and valuable quality in a leader, but significantly the next sentence reads: "The only trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player" (p. 108). Piggy on the other hand no doubt would have been a good chess player, for with a sense of responsibility still more acute than Ralph's he combines brains and common sense. Physically, however, he is ludicrous-fat, asthmatic, and almost blind without his specs. He is forever being betrayed by his body. At his first appearance he is suffering from diarrhea; his last gesture is a literally brainless twitch of the limbs, 'like a pig's after it has been killed" (p. 167). His further defect is that he is powerless, except as he works through Ralph. Though Piggy is the first to recognize the value of the conch and even shows Ralph how to blow it to summon the first assembly, he cannot sound it himself. And he lacks imagination. Scientifically minded as he is, he scorns what is intangible and he dismisses the possibility of ghosts or an imaginary beast. " 'Cos things wouldn't make sense. Houses an' streets, an'-TV- they wouldn't work" (p. 85). Of course he is quite right, 5. Quoted by Epstein, p. 277.-Eds. save that he forgets he is now on an island where the artifacts of the civilization he has always known are meaningless. It is another important character, Simon, who understands that there may indeed be a beast, even if not a palpable one-"maybe it's only us" (p. 82). The scientist Piggy has recognized it is possible to be frightened of people (p. 78), but he finds this remark of Simon's dangerous nonsense. Still Simon is right, as we see from his interview with the sow's head on a stake, which is the lord of the flies. He is right that the beast is in the boys themselves, and he alone discovers that what has caused their terror is in reality a dead parachutist ironically stifled in the elaborate clothing worn to guarantee survival. But Simon's failure is the inevitable failure of the mystic-what he knows is beyond words; he cannot impart his insights to others. Having an early glimpse of the truth, he cannot tell it. Simon became inarticulate in his effort to express man-kind's essential illness. Inspiration came to him. "What's the dirtiest thing there is?" As an answer Jack dropped into the uncomprehending silence that followed it the one crude expressive syllable. Release was like an orgasm. Those littluns who had climbed back on the twister fell off again and did not mind. The hunters were screaming with delight. Simon's effort fell about him in ruins; the laughter beat him cruelly and he shrank away defenseless to his seat (p. 82). Mockery also greets Simon later when he speaks to the lord of the flies, though this time it is sophisticated, adult mockery: "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 (p. 133). Tragically, when Simon at length achieves a vision so clear that it is readily communicable he is killed by the pig hunters in their insane belief that he is the very evil which he alone has not only understood but actually exorcised. Lake the martyr, he is killed for being precisely what he is not. The inadequacy of Jack is the most serious of all, and here perhaps if anywhere in the novel we have a personification of absolute evil. Though he is the most mature of the boys (he alone of all the characters is given a last name), and though as head of the choir he is the only one with any experience of leadership, he is arrogant and lacking in Ralph's charm and warmth. Obsessed with the idea of hunting, he organizes his choir members into a band of killers. Ostensibly they are to kill pigs, but pigs alone do not satisfy them, and pigs are in any event not needed for food. The blood lust once aroused demands nothing less than human blood. If Ralph represents purely civil authority, backed only by his own good will, Piggy's wisdom, and the crowd's easy willingness to be ruled, Jack stands for naked ruthless power, the police force or the military force acting without restraint and gradually absorbing the whole state into itself and annihilating what it cannot absorb. Yet even Jack is inadequate. He is only a little boy after all, as we are sharply reminded in a brilliant scene at the end of the book, when we suddenly see him through the eyes of the officer instead of through Ralph's (pp. 185-87), and he is, like all sheer power, anarchic. When Ralph identifies himself to the officer as "boss," Jack, who has just all but murdered him, makes a move in dispute, but overawed at last by superior power, the power of civilization and the British Navy, implicit in the officer's mere presence, he says nothing. He is a villain (Are his red hair and ugliness intended to suggest that he is a devil?), but in our world of inadequacies and imperfections even villainy does not fulfill itself completely. If not rescued, the hunters would have destroyed Ralph and made him, like the sow, an offering to the beast; but the inexorable logic of Ulysses makes us understand that they would have proceeded thence to self-destruction. Then everything includes itself in power, Power into will, will into appetite; And appetite, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey, And last eat up himself. The distance we have traveled from Ballantyne's cheerful unrealities is both artistic and moral Golding is admittedly symbolic; Ballantyne professed to be telling a true story. Yet it is the symbolic tale that, at least for our times, carries conviction. Golding's boys, who choose to remember nothing of their past before the plane accident; who, as soon as Jack commands the choir to take off the robes marked with the cross of Christianity, have no trace of religion; who demand to be ruled and are incapable of being ruled properly; who though many of them were once choir boys (Jack could sing C sharp) never sing a note on the island; in whose minds the great tradition of Western culture has left the titles of a few books for children, a knowledge of the use of matches (but no matches), and hazy memories of planes and TV sets-these boys are more plausible than Ballantyne's. His was a world of blacks and whites: bad hurricanes, good islands; good pigs obligingly allowing themselves to be taken for human food, bad sharks disobligingly taking human beings for shark food; good Christians, bad natives; bad pirates, good boys. Of the beast within, which demands blood sacrifice, first a sow's head, then a boy's, Ballantyne has some vague notion, but he cannot take it seriously. Not only does Golding see the beast; he sees that to keep it at bay we have civilization; but when by some magic or accident civilization is abolished and the human animal is left on his own, dependent upon his mere humanity, then being human is not enough. The beast appears, though not necessarily spontaneously or inevitably, for it never rages in Ralph or Piggy or Simon as it does in Roger or Jack; but it is latent in all of them, in the significantly named Piggy, in Ralph, who sometimes envies the abandon of the hunters (p. 69) and who shares the desire to "get a handful" of Robert's "brown, vulnerable flesh" (p. 106), and even in Simon burrowing into his private hiding place. After Simon's death Jack attracts all the boys but Ralph and the loyal Piggy into his army. Then when Piggy is killed and Ralph is alone, only civilization can save him. The timely arrival of the British Navy is less theatrical than logically necessary to make Golding's point. For civilization defeats the beast. It slinks back into the jungle as the boys creep out to be rescued; but the beast is real It is there, and it may return. "A World of Violence and Small Boys"1 J. T. C. GOLDING PROBABLY he will agree that his real education was picked up, almost by the way, at home. In those days when the radio was non-existent and the cost of gramophones prohibitive the only local music was the town band. Bill was lucky that Mom was good enough to accompany Dad through Handel, Mozart and others. They were often joined by an ex-bandmaster of the Coldstream Guards. The walls of that small front room are probably vibrating still. Bill, as a small boy, was terribly affected by Tosti's "Good-bye." There was painting. Dad's own paintings of scenery in Wiltshire and Cornwall hung on the walls and there were a couple of books of cheap reprints of the great ones. There were books. Chief among them was the Children's Encyclopaedia and of course Dad had access to the School Library.2 Bill was disappointed when he got to school to find he'd read most of the library. It was a small one. One book that was read and re-read was Nat the Naturalisf, by George Manville Fenn. The scene was set somewhere in the jungle in South East Asia. Bill could quote whole pages by heart and it often accompanied him to the top of 1.The following is an excerpt from a letter by J. T. C. Golding (William Golding's brother) addressed to James R. Baker on December 4, 1962. The letter appears here by permission of J. T. C. Golding and James R. Baker. 2. William Golding's father was Senior Master of Marlborough Grammar School.-Eds. the chestnut tree in the garden.3 And all the time there was a father only too willing to give a logical answer to a small boy's questions. Eventually he entered Marlborough Grammar School and emerged from a pretty sheltered life into a world of violence and small boys-and not-so-small boys. Here he met physical violence and the deliberate infliction of pain by boys. Also he noticed the tendency of small boys to gang up against the weak or those with a mannerism that put them out of step.4 Not that it was a bad school for bullying- official policy was hot against it and in any case Bill was physically well-equipped enough to look after himself. Many others will have noticed all this but the effect, in this case, on an impressionable ten-year-old may have had important results. The conjunction of the boy in the jungle in Nat the Naturalist and the school playground may have lain dormant for years until some later experience pushed it to the surface as Lord of the Flies. On the other hand the explanation is so obvious and easy that it probably isn't true. During these last years at school another writer, I think of considerable importance to him, entered his life. This was Mark Twain. Not Mark Twain of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn but of Roughing It and Innocents Abroad. He swallowed these almost as completely as he had done Nat the Naturalist. The humour of these books and their irreverence towards many accepted things encour- 3. The symbolic significance of this tree is made clear in Golding's autobiographical essay, "The Ladder and the Tree," The Listener, 63 (March 24, 1960), 531-33). The essay is vital to an understanding of the basic dialectic which is dramatized in all the novels: the conflict between the rational and the irrational elements in man's nature and the effects of this conflict on both the individual and historical levels.-Eds. 4. The "tendency" is obvious enough in Lord of the Flies: note Simon's position in Jack's chorus, Roger's attack on the "litthins," and the general abuse of Piggy. After fear drives most of the boys into the hunter tribe, they lose all capacity for dialectic and begin sadistic persecution of those who stand outside their powerful group. In Free Fall a similar pattern of behavior appears in the episodes which describe the rough-and-tumble boyhood adventures of Sammy Mountjoy.-Eds. aged his own scepticism. It was an attitude he was already adopting toward the society of 4000 people around him. In addition he had a father who welcomed criticism of any institution under the sun, though any deviation in personal conduct produced a muted rumble of thunder. The Fables of William Golding1 JOHN PETER A useful critical distinction may be drawn between a fiction and a fable. Like most worthwhile distinctions it is often easy to detect, less easy to define. The difficulty arises because the clearest definition would be in terms of an author's intentions, his pre-verbal procedures, and these are largely inscrutable and wholly imprecise. For a definition that is objective and specific we are reduced to an "as if," which is at best clumsy and at worst perhaps delusive. The distinction itself seems real enough. Fables are those narratives which leave the impression that their purpose was anterior, some initial thesis or contention which they are apparently concerned to embody and express in concrete terms. Fables always give the impression that they were preceded by the conclusion which it is their function to draw, though of course it is doubtful whether any author foresees his conclusions as fully as this, and unlikely that his work would be improved if he did. The effect of a fiction is very different. Here the author's aim, as it appears from what he has written, is evidently to present a more or less faithful reflection of the complexities, and often of the irrelevancies, of life as it is actually experienced. Such conclusions as he may draw-he is under much less compulsion to draw them than a writer of fables-do not appear to be anterior but on the contrary take their origin from the fiction itself, in which they are latent, and occasionally unrecognized. It is a matter of approach, so far as that can be 1. This article first appeared in the Kenyon Review, 19 (Autumn, 1957), 577-592. It is reprinted in part here through the courtesy of the Kenyon Review and the author. gauged. Fictions make only a limited attempt to generalize and explain the experience with which they deal, since their concern is normally with the uniqueness of this experience. Fables, starting from a skeletal abstract, must flesh out that abstract with the appearances of "real life" in order to render it interesting and cogent. 1984 is thus an obvious example of a fable, while The Rainbow is a fiction. Orwell and Lawrence, in these books, are really moving in opposite directions. If their movements could be geometrically projected to exaggerate and expose each other, Lawrence's would culminate in chaotic reportage, Orwell's in stark allegory. . . . [The distinction] has a particular value for the critic whose concern is with novels, in that it assists him in locating and defining certain merits which are especially characteristic of novels and certain faults to which they are especially prone. Both types, the fiction and the fable, have their own particular dangers. The danger that threatens a fiction is simply that it will become confused, so richly faithful to the complexity of human existence as to lose all its shape and organization. . . . The danger that threatens a fable is utterly different, in fact the precise opposite. When a fable is poor-geometrically projected again-it is bare and diagrammatic, insufficiently clothed in its garment of actuality, and in turn its appeal is extra-aesthetic and narrow. Satires like Animal Farm are of this kind. It will be said that any such distinction must be a neutral one, and that the best novels are fictions which have managed to retain their due share of the fable's coherence and order. No doubt this is true. But it also seems to be true that novels can go a good deal farther', without serious damage, in the direction of fiction than they can in the direction of fable, and this suggests that fiction is a much more congenial mode for the novelist than fable can ever be. The trouble with the mode of fable is that it is constricting. As soon as a novelist has a particular end in view the materials from which he may choose begin to shrink, and to dispose themselves toward that end. . . . The fact is that a novelist depends ultimately not only on the richness of his materials but on the richness of his interests too; and fable, by tying these to a specific end, tends to reduce both. Even the most chaotic fiction will have some sort of emergent meaning, provided it is a full and viable reflection of the life from which it derives, if only because the unconscious preoccupations of the novelist will help to impart such meaning to it, drawing it into certain lines like iron filing sprinkled in a magnetic field. Fables, however, can only be submerged in actuality with difficulty, and they are liable to bob up again like corks, in all their plain explicit-ness. It may even be true to say that they are best embodied in short stories, where' economy is vital and "pointlessness" (except for its brevity) comparatively intolerable. *** Lord of the Flies, which appeared in 1954, is set on an imaginary South Sea island, and until the last three pages the only characters in it are boys. They have apparently been evacuated from Britain, where an atomic war is raging, and are accidentally stranded on the island without an adult supervisor. The administrative duties of their society (which includes a number of "littluns," aged about six) devolve upon their elected leader, a boy of twelve named Ralph, who is assisted by a responsible, unattractive boy called Piggy, but as time passes an independent party grows up, the "hunters," led by an angular ex-choir leader named Jack Merridew. This party, soon habituated to the shedding of animal blood, recedes farther and farther from the standards of civilization which Ralph and Piggy are straining to preserve, and before very long it is transformed into a savage group of outlaws with a costume and a ritual of their own. In the course of one of their dance-feasts, drunk with tribal excitement, they are responsible for killing the one individual on the island who has a real insight into the problems of their lives, a frail boy called Simon, subject to fainting fits, and after this more or less intentional sacrifice they lose all sense of restraint and become a band of criminal marauders, a threat to everyone on the island outside their own tribe. Piggy is murdered by their self-constituted witch doctor and torturer, the secretive and sinister Roger, and Ralph is hunted by them across the island like the pigs they are accustomed to kill. Before they can kill and decapitate him a naval detachment arrives and takes charge of all the children who have survived. It is obvious that this conclusion is not a concession to readers who require a happy ending-only an idiot will suppose that the book ends happily-but a deliberate device by which to throw the story into focus. With the appearance of the naval officer the bloodthirsty hunters are instantly reduced to a group of painted urchins led by "a little boy who wore the remains of an extraordinary black cap," yet the reduction cannot expunge the knowledge of what they have done and meant to do. The abrupt return to childhood, to insignificance, underscores the argument of the narrative: that Evil is inherent in the human mind itself, whatever innocence may cloak it, ready to put forth its strength as soon as the occasion is propitious. This is Golding's theme, and it takes on a frightful force by being presented in juvenile terms, in a setting that is twice deliberately likened to the sunny Coral Island of R. M. Ballantyne.2 The boys' society represents, in embryo, the society of the adult world, their impulses and convictions are those of adults incisively abridged, and the whole narrative is a powerfully ironic commentary on the nature of Man, an accusation levelled at us all. There are no excuses for complacency in the fretful conscientiousness of Ralph, the leader, nor in Piggy's anxious commonsense, nor are the miscreants made to seem exceptional. When he first encounters a pig, Jack Merridew is quite incapable of harming it, "because of the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh," and even the delinquent Roger is at first restrained by the taboos of "parents and school and policemen and the law." Strip these away and even Ralph might be a hunter: it is his duties as a leader that save him, rather than any intrinsic virtue in himself.3 Like any orthodox moralist Golding insists that Man is a fallen creature, but he refuses to hypostatize Evil or to locate it in a dimension of its own. On the contrary Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, is Roger and Jack and you and I, ready to declare himself as soon as we permit him to. The intentness with which this thesis is developed leaves 2.A discussion of the relationship between Ballantyne's novel The Coral Island, published in 1857 in England, and Lord of the Flies occurs in Carl Niemeyer's "The Coral Island Revisited," College English, 22 (January, 1961), 241-245. Reprinted in this volume, pp. 217-223.-Eds. 3. As an illustration of this argument, note Ralph's actions when the boys attack Robert as the substitute pig, p. 106 and when Simon is killed as the beast, p. 141.-Eds. no doubt that the novel is a fable, a deliberate translation of a proposition into the dramatized terms of art, and as usual we have to ask ourselves how resourceful and complete the translation has been, how fully the, thesis has been absorbed and rendered implicit in the tale as it is told. A writer of fables will heat his story at the fire of his convictions, but when he has finished, the story must glow apart, generating its own heat from within. Golding himself provides a criterion for judgment here, for he offers a striking example of how complete the translation of a statement into plastic terms can be. Soon after their arrival the children develop an irrational suspicion that there is a predatory beast at large on the island. This has of course no real existence, as Piggy for one points out, but to the littluns it is almost as tangible as their castles in the sand, and most of the older boys are afraid they may be right. One night when all are sleeping there is an air battle ten miles above the sea and a parachuted man, already dead, comes drifting down through the darkness, to settle among the rocks that crown the island's only mountain. There the corpse lies unnoticed, rising and falling with the gusts of the wind, its harness snagged on the bushes and its parachute distending and collapsing. When it is discovered and the frightened boys mistake it for the beast, the sequence is natural and convincing, yet the implicit statement is quite unmistakable too. The incomprehensible threat which has hung over them is, so to speak, identified and explained: a nameless figure who is Man himself, the boys' own natures, the something that all humans have in common. This is finely done and needs no further comment, but unhappily the explicit comment has already been provided, in Simon's halting explanation of the beast's identity: "What I mean is ... maybe it's only us." And a little later we are told that "However Simon thought of the beast, there rose before his inward sight the picture of a human at once heroic and sick." This over-explicitness is my main criticism of what is in many ways a work of real distinction, and for two reasons it appears to be a serious one. In the first place the fault is precisely that which any fable is likely to incur: the incomplete translation of its thesis into its story so that much remains external and extrinsic, the teller's assertion rather than the tale's enactment before our eyes. In the second place the fault is a persistent one, and cannot easily be discounted or ignored. It appears in expository annotations like this, when Ralph and Jack begin to quarrel: The two boys faced each other. There was the brilliant world of hunting, tactics, fierce exhilaration, skill; and there was the world of longing and baffled commonsense. Less tolerably, it obtrudes itself in almost everything- thought, action, and hallucination-that concerns the clairvoyant Simon, the "batty" boy who understands "mankind's essential illness," who knows that Ralph will get back to where he came from, and who implausibly converses with the Lord of the Flies. Some warrant is provided for this clairvoyance in Simon's mysterious illness, but it is inadequate. The boy remains unconvincing in himself, and his presence constitutes a standing invitation to the author to avoid the trickiest problems of his method, by commenting too baldly on the issues he has raised. Any writer of fables must find it hard to ignore an invitation or this kind once it exists. Golding has not been able to ignore it, and the blemishes that result impose some serious, though not decisive, limitations on a fiery and disturbing story. Introduction1 IAN GREGOR and MARK KINKEAD-WEEKES The urge to put things into categories seems to satisfy some deep human need and in this matter at least, critics and historians of literature are very human people indeed. A brief glance at the English Literature section of any library catalogue will show what I mean. There we find literature divided up into various lands of writings, and within the kinds we nave historical periods, and within the periods we have groups or movements, and within the groups individuals who write various kinds. . . . Now up to a point of course this sort of classification serves a very useful purpose. We need a map if we are going to do any exploring, and the fact that it is the countryside we have come to enjoy, not the map, doesn't make the map any less necessary. If we take out a map of The Novel we find, if it is a general one, that it falls into three sections-the eighteenth-century novel, the Victorian novel, and the modern novel. And these descriptions point not simply to three centuries, but to decisive changes that have taken place within the form of the novel. These changes are often due to historical circumstances, and sometimes they can be described in terms of the ruling ideas of the age or the literary expectations of the readers, out there are other changes and shifts in fiction which seem to arise from the very nature of the novel itself. A shift of this land may be seen in a useful classification into "fables" and "fictions." It is a little 1. This essay appears as the Introduction to the "School Edition" of Lord of the Flies published by Faber and Faber, Ltd., London, 1962, pp. i-xii. It is reprinted here by permission of Faber and Faber and the authors. difficult to define this difference satisfactorily in the abstract, but it is fairly easy to see what is meant in practice. When, for instance, D. H. Lawrence wrote in one of his letters, "I am doing a novel which I have never grasped. Damn its eyes, here I am at page 145 and I've no notion what it's about . . . it's like a novel in a foreign language which I don't know very well," he was almost certainly occupied in writing a fiction and not a fable. In other words, a fiction is something which takes the form of an exploration for the novelist, even if it lacks the very extreme position which Lawrence describes; the concern is very much with trying to make clear the individuality of a situation, of a person; for these reasons it is extremely difficult to describe a fiction satisfactorily in abstract terms. With a fable, on the other hand, the case is very different Here the writer begins with a general idea-"the world is not the reasonable place we are led to believe," "all power corrupts" -and seeks to translate it into fictional terms. In this kind of writing the interest of the particular detail lies in the way it points to the generalization behind it. It is generally very easy to say what a fable is "about," because the writers whole purpose is to make the reader respond to it in precisely that way. Clear examples of fiction in the way I am using the word would be works like D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers or Emily Bronte's Withering Heights; clear examples of fable, Swift's Gulliver's Travels or Orwell's Animal Farm. But these are extreme works and most novels have elements of both. Oliver Twist, for instance, is certainly a fiction in its portrayal of the intensely imagined criminal world; but it also moves towards fable when ft describes the world of the poorhouse, and the people who finally rescue Oliver from that world, because here Dickens is moved to write primarily by abstract ideas, the educational hardships of children, the wisdom of benevolence. You will notice I said that Oliver Twist "moves towards" fiction, "moves towards" fable, and in this kind of alternation it is typical of many novels which lie between such extreme examples as I mentioned above. Now when we turn to Mr. Golding's Lord of the Flies we find that what is remarkable is that it is a fable and a fiction simultaneously. And I want to devote the remainder of this Introduction to developing that remark. When we first begin to write and talk about Mr. Golding's novel, it is the aspect of fable which occupies our attention. And this is very natural because the book is a very satisfying one to talk about Mr. Golding, our account might run, is examining what human nature is really like if we could consider it apart from the mass of social detail which gives a recognizable feature to our daily lives. That "really" is important and you may want to argue about it, but Mr. Golding's assumption here is one that most of us make at one time or another. "Of course," we say of someone, "he's not really like that at all," and then we go on to construct an account which assumes that a distorting film of circumstance hate come between us and the man's "real self." What Mr. Golding has done in Lord of the Flies is to create a situation which will reveal in an extremely direct way this "real self," and yet at the same time keep our sense of credibility, our sense of the day-to-day world, lively and sharp. It is rather like performing a delicate heart operation, but feeling that the sense of human gravity comes not through the actual operation but through the external scene -the green-robed figures, the arc light which casts no shadow, the sound of a car in the street outside. And it was in Ballantyne's Coral Island, a book published in the middle of the last century, that Mr. Golding found the suggestion for his "external scene." This is not a question of turning Ballantyne inside out, so that where his boys are endlessly brave, resourceful and Christian, Mr. Golding's are frightened, anarchic and savage; rather Mr. Golding's adventure story is to point up in a forceful and economic way the terrifying gap between the appearance and the reality. We do not need to know Coral Island to appreciate Lord of the Flies, but if we do know it we will appreciate more vividly the power of Mr. Golding's book. If we take Ralph's remark about "the darkness of man's heart" as coming very close to the subject of the book, it is worth just remembering that this book, published in 1954, was written in a world very different from Ballantyne's, one which had seen within twenty years the systematic destruction of the Jewish race, a world war revealing unnumbered atrocities of what man had done to man, and in 1945 the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb which has come to dominate all our political and moral thinking. Turning from these general considerations of Mr. Golding's fable to the way it is actually worked out, we find the novel divided into three sections. The first deals with the arrival of the boys on the island, the assembly, the early decisions about what to do; the emphasis falls on the paradisal landscape, the hope of rescue, and the pleasures of day-to-day events. Everything within this part of the book is contained within law and rule: the sense of the aweful and the forbidden is strong. Jack cannot at first bring himself to kill a pig because of "the enormity of the knife descending and cutting into living flesh; because of the unbearable blood." Roger throws stones at Henry, but he throws to miss because "round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law." The world in this part of the book is the world of children's games. The difference comes when there is no parental summons to bring these games to an end. These games have to continue throughout the day, and through the day that follows. And it is worth noting that Mr. Golding creates his first sense of unease through something which is familiar to every child in however protected a society-the waning of the light. It is the dreams that usher in the beastie, the snake, the unidentifiable threat to security. The second part of the book could be said to begin when that threat takes on physical reality, with the arrival of the dead airman. Immediately the fear is crystallized, all the boys are now affected, discussion has increasingly to give way to action. As the narrative increases in tempo, so its implications enlarge. Ralph has appealed to the adult world for help, "If only they could send us something grown-up ... a sign or something," and the dead airman is shot down in flames over the island. Destruction is everywhere; the boy's world is only a miniature version of the adult's. By now the nature of the destroyer is becoming clearer; it is not a beastie or snake but man's own nature. "What I mean is ... maybe it's only us," Simon's insight is confined to himself and he has to pay the price of his own life for trying to communicate it to others. Simon's death authenticates this truth, and now that the fact of evil has actually been created on the island, the airman is no longer necessary and his body vanishes in a high wind and is carried out to sea. The third part of the book, and the most terrible, explores the meaning and consequence of this creation of evil. Complete moral anarchy is unleashed by Simon's murder. The world of the game, which embodied in however an elementary way, rule and order, is systematically destroyed, because hardly anyone can now remember when things were otherwise. When the destruction is complete, Mr. Golding suddenly restores "the external scene" to us, not the paradisal world of the marooned boys, but our world. The naval officer speaks, we realize with horror, our words, "the kid needed a bath, a hair-cut, a nose wipe and a good deal of ointment." He carries our emblems of power, the white drill, the epaulettes, the gilt-buttons, the revolver, the trim cruiser. Our everyday sight has been restored to us, but the experience of reading the book is to make us re-interpret what we see, and say with Macbeth "mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses." If we are to look at Lord of the Flies from the point of view of it being a fable this is the kind of account we might give. And, as far as it goes, it is a true account. The main weakness in discussing Lord of the Flies is that we are too often inclined to leave our description at this point. So we find a Christian being deeply moved by the book and arguing that its greatness is tied up with the way in which the author brings home to a modem reader the doctrine of Original Sin; or we find a humanist finding the novel repellent precisely because it endorses what he feels to be a dangerous myth; or again, on a different level, we find a Liberal asserting the importance of the book because of its unwavering exposure or the corruptions of power. Now whatever degree of truth we find in these views, it is important to be dear that the quality or otherwise of Lord of the Flies is not dependent upon any of them. Whether Mr. Golding has written a good novel or not is not because of "the views" which may be deduced from it, but because of his claim to be a novelist. And the function of the novelist as Joseph Conrad once said is "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel-it is, before all, to make you see." And it is recognition of this that must take us back from Mr. Golding's fable, however compelling, to his fiction. Earlier I suggested that these two aspects occur simultaneously, so that in moving from one to the other, we are not required to look at different parts of the novel, but at the same thing from a different point of view. Let us begin by looking at the coral island. We have mentioned the careful literary reference to Ballantyne ("Like the Coral Island," the naval officer remarks), the theological overtones with the constant paradisal references, "flower and fruit grew together on the same tree," but all these things matter only because Mr. Golding has imaginatively put the island before us. The sun and the thunder come across to us as physical realities, not because they have a symbolic part to play in the book, but because of the novelist's superb resourcefulness of language. Consider how difficult it is to write about a tropical island and avoid any hint of the travel poster cliche or the latest documentary film about the South Seas. To see how the difficulty can be overcome look at the following paragraph: Strange things happened at midday. The glittering sea rose up, moved apart in planes of blatant impossibility; the coral reef and the few, stunted palms that clung to the more elevated parts would float up into the sky, would quiver, be plucked apart, run like raindrops on a wire or be repeated as in an odd succession of mirrors. Sometimes land loomed where there was no land and flicked out like a bubble as the children watched, (p. 53.) It is this kind of sensitivity to language, this effortless precision of statement that makes the novel worth the most patient attention. And what applies to the island applies to the characters also. As Jack gradually loses his name so that at the end of the novel he is simply the Chief we feel this terrible loss of identity coming over in his total inability to do anything that is not instinctively gratifying. He begins to talk always in the same way, to move with the same intent. But this is in final terrible stages of the novel. If we turn back to the beginning of the novel we find Mr. Golding catching perfectly a tone of voice, a particular rhythm of speech. Ralph is talking to Piggy shortly after they have met: "I could swim when I was five. Daddy taught me. He's a commander in the Navy. When he gets leave he'll come and rescue us. What's your father?" Piggy flushed suddenly. "My dad's dead," he said quickly, "and my mum-" He took off his glasses and looked vainly for something with which to clean them. "I used to live with my auntie. She kept a candy store. I used to get ever so many candies. As many as I liked. When'll your dad rescue us?" "Soon as he can." (p. 11.) Notice how skillfully Mr. Golding has caught in that snatch of dialogue, not only schoolboy speech rhythms,2 but also, quite unobtrusively, the social difference between the two boys. "What's your father?", "When'll your dad rescue us?" There are two continents of social experience hinted at here. I draw attention to this passage simply to show that in a trivial instance, in something that would never be quoted in any account of "the importance" of the book, it is the gifts which are peculiar to a novelist, "to make you hear, to make you feel . . . to make you see," that are being displayed. Perhaps, however, we feel these gifts most unmistakably present not in the way the landscape is presented to us, nor the characters, but rather in the extraordinary momentum and power which drives the whole narrative forward, so that one incident leads to another with an inevitability which is awesome. A great deal of this power comes from Mr. Golding's careful preparation for an incident: so that the full significance of a scene is only gradually revealed. Consider, for instance, one of these. Early in the book Ralph discovers the nickname of his companion with delight: "Piggy! Piggy!" Ralph danced out into the hot air of the beach and then returned as a fighter plane, with wings swept back, and machine-gunned Piggy. Time passes, games give way to hunting, but still the hunting can only be talked about in terms of a game and when Jack describes his first kill, it takes the form of a game: "I cut the pig's throat---" The twins, still sharing their identical grin, jumped up and ran round each other. Then the rest joined in, making pig-dying noises and shouting. 2.In their notes for this edition the authors define all of the schoolboy slang terms that are likely to confuse adult readers.- Eds. "One for his nob!" "Give him a fourpenny one!" Then Maurice pretended to be the pig and ran squealing into the centre, and the hunters, circling still, pretended to beat him. As they danced, they sang. "Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Bash her in." Ralph watched them, envious and resentful. Not till they flagged and the chant died away, did he speak "I'm calling an assembly." There is an exasperation in Ralph's statement which places him outside the game, the fantasy fighter plane has no place in this more hectic play; the line between pretense and reality is becoming more difficult to see. The first incident emerged from an overflow of high spirits, the second from the deeper need to communicate an experience. When the game is next played, the exuberant mood has evaporated. Maurice's place has been taken by Robert: Jack shouted. "Make a ring!" The circle moved in and round. Robert squealed in mock terror, then in real pain. "Ow! Stop it! You're hurting!" The butt end of a spear fell on his back as he blundered among them. "Hold him!" They got his arms and legs. Ralph, carried away by a sudden thick excitement, grabbed Eric's spear and jabbed at Robert with it. "Kill him! Kill him!" All at once, Robert was screaming and struggling with the strength of frenzy. Jack had him by the hair and was brandishing his knife. Behind him was Roger, fighting to get close. The chant rose ritually, as at the last moment of a dance or a hunt. "Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!" Ralph too was fighting to get near, to get a handful of that brown, vulnerable flesh. The desire to squeeze and hurt was over-mastering. The climax is reached when the game turns into the killing of Simon-the pig, first mentioned in Ralph's delighted mockery of Piggy's name, made more real in the miming of Maurice and then in the hurting of Robert, becomes indistinguishable from Simon who is trampled to death. This series of incidents, unobtrusive in any ordinary reading, nevertheless helps to drive the book forward with its jet-like power and speed. Just before Simon's arrival at the feast, there is a sudden pause and silence, the game is suspended. "Roger ceased to be a pig and became a hunter, so that the centre of the ring yawned emptily," It is that final phrase which crystallizes the emotion, so that we feel we are suddenly on the brink of tragedy without being able to locate it. It is now, after the violence, that the way is clear for the spiritual climax of the novel. As Simon's body is carried out to sea we are made aware, in the writing, of the significance of Simon's whole function in the novel; the beauty of the natural world and its order hints at a harmony beyond the tortured world of man and to which now Simon has access. And Mr. Golding has made this real to us, not by asserting some abstract proposition with which we may or may not agree, but by "the power of the written word." During the last part of this Introduction when I have been urging the importance of Lord of the Flies as a fiction, you may think that I am putting forward some claim for Mr. Golding as a stylist, a writer of fine prose, rather in the manner of Oscar Wilde saying that there is no such thing as good books and bad books, only well written and badly written books. This is dangerously misleading if we interpret this as meaning we can separate what is being said from how it is being said. If, on the other hand, we intend that the content of a novel only "lives" in direct relation to the writer's ability to communicate it imaginatively, then Wilde's remark is surely true. Ultimately, Mr. Golding's book is valuable to us, not because it "tells us about" the darkness of man's heart, but because it shows it, because it is a work of art which enables us to enter into the world it creates and live at the level of a deeply perceptive and intelligent man. His vision becomes ours, and such a translation should make us realize the truth of Shelley's remark that "the great instrument for the moral good is the imagination." An Old Story Well Told1 WILLIAM R. MUELLER I Lord of the Flies uncovers the fallen and unredeemed human heart; it sketches the enormities of which man, unrestrained by human law and resistant to divine grace, is capable. The varying degrees of goodness, as manifested by Simon, Piggy and Ralph, are simply no match for a murderous Jack or a head-hunting Roger. When we first meet the boys, recently dropped onto an island after escaping from their bomb-ravaged part of the world, they are still trailing faint clouds of glory. Even Roger, who shares with Jack the most diabolic potentialities of them all, early in the novel manifests a thin sheath of decency and restraint; in throwing stones at one of the smaller boys he is careful to miss, to leave untouched and inviolate a small circle surrounding his teased victim: "Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law. Roger's arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins." The novel delineates the gradual unconditioning of the arm and the unveiling of the heart of Roger and some of his companions. Lord of the Flies is, of course, more than an expository disquisition on sin. Were it only that, it would have gone virtually unnoticed. The book is a carefully structured work of art whose organization-in terms of a series of hunts- serves to reveal with progressive clarity man's essential core. There are six stages, six hunts, constituting the dark- 1.This article is reprinted in part by permission of The Christian Century, 80 (October 2, 1963), 1203-06. Copyright (c) 1963 by the Christian Century Foundation. est of voyages as each successive one takes us closer to natural man. To trace the hunts-with pigs and boys as victims-is to feel Gelding's full impact. As Ralph, the builder of fires and shelters, is the main constructive force on the island, Jack, the hunter, is the primary destructive force. Hunting does of course provide food, but it also gratifies the lust for blood. In his first confrontation with a pig, Jack fails, unable to plunge his knife into living flesh, to bear the sight of flowing blood, and unable to do so because he is not yet far enough away from the "taboo of the old life." But under the questioning scrutiny of his companions he feels a bit ashamed of his fastidiousness, and, driving his knife into a tree trunk, he fiercely vows that the next time will be different. And so it is. Returning from the second hunt he proclaim; proudly that he has cut a pig's throat. Yet he has not reached the point of savage abandonment: we learn that he "twitched" as he spoke of his achievement-an involuntary gesture expressing his horror at the deed and disclosing the tension between the old taboo and the new freedom. His reflection upon the triumph, however, indicates that pangs of conscience must certainly fade before the glorious feeling of new and devastating power: "His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink." The third hunt is unsuccessful; the boar gets away. Nonetheless it plants the seed of an atrocity previously undreamed, and it is followed by an ominous make-believe, a mock hunt in which Robert, one of the younger boys, plays pig, the others encircling him and jabbing with their spears. The play becomes frenzied with cries of "Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!" An almost overwhelming dark desire possesses the boys. Only a fraction of the old taboo now remains; the terrified Robert emerges alive, but with a wounded rump. What is worse, the make-believe is but the prelude to an all too real drama. II The fourth hunt is an electrifying success, a mayhem accomplished with no twitch of conscience, no element of pretense. The boys discover a sow "sunk in deep maternal bliss," "the great bladder of her belly . . . fringed with a row of piglets that slept or burrowed and