He’s definitely the best?after all, he’s elected chief. He is good looking. He’s “fair” (1 . 1) and “attractive. ” More than that, he has the conch. And he can blow it. Because the conch symbolizes power and order, because he has the conch he gets a head start in the island power structure. Instead of getting caught up in the hunting bloodless, he proposes something practical, sensible, start a fire, and then watch it to make sure it doesn’t go out. He’s got nerve, too. When someone has to go look for the “beast,” Ralph appoints himself.
When see’s scared, he “[binds] himself together with his will” (7. 246), meaning that he’s able to force himself to do something he really, really doesn’t want to do for the good of the group. It looks like his power depends on civilization. He lifted the conch. ‘Seems to me we ought to have a chief to decide things’ (1 . 228). A chief, to Ralph, is a sort of first-among-equals deal, someone who’s elected to keep things in order. As he thinks, “if you [are] a chief, you [have] to think, you [have] to be wise you [have] to grab at a decision” (5. 10). See that word “decide” used twice?
For Ralph, chiefdom is about leading people. It’s not about personal power or triumph; it’s about making sure the group is taken care of, which means making sure the little ones get looked after, keeping people from pooping where they eat (literally), and getting that darn fire lit. One of Rally’s first actions is taking off his clothes. Believe us when we say that strapping is never a good sign: it’s the first step to becoming a lawless savage. Here’s how it goes down: He [Ralph] jumped down from the terrace. The sand was thick over his black shoes and the heat hit him.
He became unconscious of the weight of clothes, kicked his shoes off fiercely and ripped off each stocking with its elastic garter in a single movement. Then he leapt back on the terrace, pulled off his shirt, and stood there among the skull-like coconuts with green shadows from the palms and forest sliding over his skin. He undid the snake-clasp of his belt, lugged off his shorts and pants, and stood there naked, looking at the dazzling beach and the water. (1. 53) While this is probably a more sensible way to run around a deserted island than in black shoes and garters.
But it’s also a sign that, underneath his school inform, Ralph is just as much a little savage as any of the other boys. We get a hint of this even earlier, when he “shriek[s] with laughter” about Piggy’s name (1 Ralph may be a good kid, but he’s still a kid. When it comes to hunting, Ralph starts to seem even more sinister. The first time he wounds a pig, he talks “excitedly” and thinks that maybe “hunting was good after all” (7) And then, when the party at Jack’s starts to heat up, they find themselves “eager to take a place in this demented but partly secure society” (9)?which pretty soon turns into the brutal murder of Simon.
NO matter how much Ralph tries to convince himself that “we left early” (1 0), it’s not true: he helped kill Simon. The beast lives in him, too. In the end, he’s all animal: he “launched himself like a cat; stabbed, snarling, with the spear, and the savage doubled up” (12. 165), keeping himself alive long enough to roll away from Jack’s band and end up at the feet of the naval officer?safe. For now. Ralph gradually deteriorates over the course of the novel. As order and rules go by the wayside, so does the order within Ralph s own head. He can remember that he wants a signal fire, but he can’t remember why.
He know,n. RSI it’s something to do with smoke, but then he can’t put two and two together. Piggy has to help him out repeatedly, and the gap in Rally’s train of thoughts worsens as the novel progresses. When they confront Jack and the “savages,” Piggy has to remind him: “remember what we came for. The fire. My specs” (1 1. 159). That just might make Ralph our tragic figure. Sure, Piggy and Simon both die. But Ralph is the one who has to go back to civilization with the knowledge that, underneath his schoolboy uniform, he’s nothing more than a lawless, orderlies savage.
Ralph Timeline and Summary CLC As the novel opens, ‘the fair boy,” makes his way out of the jungle, toward the lagoon. L] Ralph and Piggy discuss their situation?that their plane has gone down and that there are no adults to take Care of them and then find a big, white conch shell. Ralph uses it to summon all the boys to a meeting and is elected chief. L] Ralph makes several efforts before an amazing sound comes out of the shell, “a deep, harsh boom. ” C: He insists on making and watching a signal fire. Ralph and Jack argue about building shelters, keeping fires going, and, of ours, killing pigs.
When the fire goes out and a ship passes by them, Ralph tries to lay down the law, but his meeting disintegrates pretty quickly. ј In fact, he says he wants to give up. But he doesn’t. Instead, he uses his chiefdom to nerve himself up to look for the imaginary beast. CLC Everyone heads up the mountain to restart the fire, which has gone out again, with Ralph feeling bummed and homesick. C Right about then the bushes crash ahead of them and a large boar (a male pig with tusks) comes rushing out. Ralph hits it with his spear and decides that hunting isn’t so bad after all.
But he’s pretty uneasy with how the boys are blood-thirstily re-enacting the hunt. C] Ralph, Jack, and Roger find “the beast,” I. E. Parachute, which means that everyone’s too afraid to go up the mountain to start a signal fire They build a new one on the beach, but almost all the begins desert for Jack’s new tribe. It’s all fun and games and delicious pig belly until Simon stumbles in and the boys beat him to death. Later, Ralph and Piggy convince themselves that it never happened. L] When Jack’s team steals Piggy’s glasses, he and Ralph clean up and head over to get them back.
D Ralph announces that he’s calling an assembly, but it doesn’t happen. Instead, Piggy falls off a cliff and dies. њ Ralph is totally alone. He feels worse when Sameness sneak off to tell him that Jack’s planning to kill him. O A huge fight involving sharpened sticks and fire. D Ralph is pretty convinced he’s going to die, when suddenly a naval officer shows up to ask who’s in charge. D When the officer asks who’s boss, Ralph answers loudly that he is. He stares at the officer dumbly, hardly able to comprehend that the rescuers have finally arrived.
Ralph begins to rye, sobbing for the first time about Simon, about Piggy, about ‘the end of innocence, [and about] the darkness of man’s heart. Jack For Jack, the island is like the best summer vacation ever. He gets to swear, play war games, hunt things, and paint his face?all without any grownups around to send him to his room for accidentally killing the neighbors. Like Ralph, Jack is charismatic and inclined to leadership. Unlike Ralph, he gets off on power and abuses his position above others. Jack is ugly. Well, according the narrator he is: he’s “tall, thin, and bony: and his hair was red beneath the black cap.
His face was crumpled and freckled, and ugly without silliness. Out of this face stared two light blue eyes, frustrated now, and turning or ready to turn, to anger” (1). We’ve just met him, and we’re already getting a bad feeling. Where Ralph is described as “fair” and “attractive,” Jack is freckled and redheaded. Ralph is elected leader because he seems pretty mature, and he’s our protagonist for pretty much the same reasons. Buttock doesn’t get it. He thinks that he deserves to be chief because he’s “chapter chorister and head boy. [He] can sing C sharp” (1. 28-30)?in other words, for no good reason at all.
He should be leader because he’s always been leader in the past, even though that leadership was based on something completely unrelated to his ability to govern: a nice singing voice. The problem with this kind of social structure is that it’s not based on anything real. At first, Jack seems ready to help Ralph establish order: “We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything” (2. 192). But saying “we have to have rules because we’re English and awesome” is, when oh think about it, identical to saying “l should be leader because I can sing C sharp. It’s meaningless It disguises the fact attack is actually a pretty scary dude. As soon as there’s no civilization to keep him in line, he?unlike Ralph?falls out of line. Jacks ability for evil is huge, he leads the brutal slaughter of a pig?and then Simon. He fosters (encourages) rebellion. He has his minions beat a kid named Wilfred for some unspecified misdeed. He throws a spear at Ralph with “full intention” (1 1 trying to kill him, and then sends the minions after him to finish the job. But he couldn’t do any of this without power.
And somehow, he gets it. When he leaves Rally’s group, he convinces the others to come with him by promising a hunt. The pre-teen boys arena ‘t interested in Rally’s boy-scout team-building and fire-watching. They want blood. And once Jack gets control, he turns from a choir boy into a, well, this: A great log had been dragged into the center of the lawn and Jack, painted and garlanded, sat there like an idol… Power lay in the brown swell Of his forearms: authority sat on his shoulder and chattered in his ear like an ape. “All sit down.
The boys ranged themselves in rows on the grass before him but Ralph and Piggy stayed a foot lower, standing on the soft sand. Jack ignored them for the moment, turned his mask down to the seated boys and pointed at them with his spear. (9. 37, 52-56) By the end of the book, Jack has become a subhuman terror, inspiring panic in Ralph and awe in the rest of the boys. Or has he? Throughout the whole story, we get little hints that this might be nothing more than a game gone wrong. When Jack leaves Rally’s group, check how he does it: His voice trailed off. The hands that held the conch shook.
