Ralph is described as attractive and strong. He is seen as a natural leader, confident and charismatic. However, he is also impulsive; he explores the island without much thought. He is certain that his father, who is in the Navy, will rescue them, and he's excited to have a fun adventure before the adults come back. He is a physical kid (his biggest feelings come out as headstands), and in the beginning he seems untroubled by their situation on the island. Ralph isn't mean, but he isn't overly nice either. He is good-natured and fair. He seems to have a natural inclination toward order and justice. He defends Piggy when Jack calls him Fatty, but in doing so, he unthinkingly tells everyone the nickname "Piggy," which Piggy had asked him not to reveal. The other kids look up to Ralph and are reassured by his confident attitude and lack of concern. 

Piggy is physically unsuited to life on the island. He is overweight, asthmatic, and he wears glasses. He does not fit in well with the other boys, and he seems especially desperate for Ralph's attention and approval. The other boys view him as an outcast because, in many ways, he is the weakest. However, in other ways, Piggy seems like the best choice for a leader. He is the first to grasp the seriousness of their situation. He is the one who teaches Ralph to use the conch shell and who suggests they use it to gather the other survivors. He is also concerned about the younger boys. He's the one who attempts to learn everyone's name and keep track of who is on the island. If the others would listen to him, Piggy would make a good advisor. 

Jack is the tallest of the boys, and the novel describes him as ugly. Before the crash, he was the leader of the choir, and he views himself as the most obvious choice for leader. (He is actually the only boy who volunteers for the position.) Jack is aggressive and ambitious. However, he doesn't treat the choir well, and the boys see his bid for leadership as vaguely threatening. At the end of chapter one, Jack is poised to kill the piglet, but he hesitates. He wants to be able to kill the pig (and he's the first boy to understand that such violence might be necessary for their survival), but he isn't ready. His better nature holds him back. However, he is openly and actively trying to overcome this better nature and vows it will be different next time.

sorts of things might happen later in the novel?

Jack's encounter with the piglet seems like a significant moment of foreshadowing. Jack wants to kill the piglet, but he isn't desensitized enough to do so yet. He is deeply aware of the significance of the moment, and the entire pace of the story slows while he hesitates. After the piglet escapes, Jack swears he will kill it next time. He seems like he's trying to sever ties with the life he had before, where he was an innocent English schoolboy, and embrace his wilder, less-civilized nature, which might help him to survive but might also change him fundamentally. I would predict that later in the novel Jack will be faced with the choice between mercy and violence again, and he might make a different choice.

I also think the moment where Ralph tells everyone Piggy's nickname might be foreshadowing. Ralph leaps to Piggy defense when Jack calls him Fatty, but Ralph is impulsive and thoughtless, and he ends up betraying Piggy instead of helping him. I would predict that later in the novel Ralph's impulsiveness might inadvertently cause harm.      

An unspecified amount of time has passed between the end of chapter two (when Jack failed to kill the piglet) and the beginning of chapter three. Chapter three opens with a more experienced version of Jack. In this version, he is completely focused on the hunt. He notices everything, including the polished underside of a single tendril of creeper that has been brushed by the bristles on a pig’s hide. Jack moves through the forest easily now; he is completely at home and completely alert. The novel lingers over his physical body, describing the way his nostrils flare and his tongue moves across his dry lips. His eyes are described as nearly mad. He is likened to an animal twice in the space of paragraphs. First, he’s compared to a crouching dog on all fours, and then, when he’s startled by an unexpected noise, he’s described as ape-like and furtive. These descriptions make the reader suspect that Jack is beginning to lose his humanity; he’s giving into his animal nature.  A little later, we learn that Jack sent the other hunters back to the beach hours earlier (where they spent the afternoon swimming), and he continued hunting alone. This information tells us that Jack is growing increasingly isolated by his fixation. He is obsessed with killing a pig. He’s overcome the hesitation he felt at the end of chapter two, and now his highest priority is to track and kill and get meat. While Jack always seemed aggressive, ambitious, and somewhat threatening, he now seems capable of cruelty. He is becoming untamed and wild, even violent.

When Jack encounters Ralph at the beginning of chapter three, there is a new tension between them. Ralph is still trying to establish normalcy on the island. He’s preoccupied with building shelters and tending to the signal fire so they’ll have a chance at being rescued. Ralph wants Jack’s help with these things, but Jack is only interested in hunting. At times, Jack struggles to remember what rescue even means. The two boys struggle to communicate because they have different priorities and they seem to be moving in opposite directions. Jack is embracing his primitive nature along with some of his darker impulses, and Ralph is continuing to try to impose structure and order on the island. Considering that the boys were already briefly in conflict over which one would become chief, I think their differences will ultimately end in rivalry. They may even struggle for power and possibly resort to violence.

We see different qualities when we’re looking at the island through the perspective of different characters. Ralph is a leader who is trying to maintain order and create civilization; he believes the island is inherently good, but he is still deeply linked to his former life and he is preoccupied with the idea of being rescued. Piggy is intelligent but also weak and needy; he’s ill-suited to the island. Jack is fierce and domineering; his view of the island is harder than the other boys’ and he is consumed with survival. Simon is unique. Through his perspective, we see the island’s softness and beauty. Simon notices light and aroma, birdsong and butterflies, the delicacy of small flowers. Simon is also the only boy who is intentionally kind. He gathers hard-to-reach fruit for the younger boys and he is the only one who helps Ralph build the last shelter. However, Simon is also a loner. He’s quiet and possibly shy. At the end of chapter three, we see him sneaking off into a beautiful, light-filled clearing where he’s built his own small shelter, hidden away from the other boys. It’s hard to predict how the other boys will react to Simon later in the novel. Simon seems to embody the good in human nature. He’s helpful and kind, and the other boys like and respect him, so he might be able to keep the boys tethered to their better natures. On the other hand, since he’s a loner and shy -- and his perspective is so unusual -- there’s a chance he might be misunderstood. The boys might even turn on him as they’re increasingly overcome by their darker sides.

When Maurice and Roger arrive on the beach at the beginning of chapter four, they walk through the area where the little boys are playing and deliberately knock over their sandcastles and kick up sand. Percival is unlucky enough to get sand in his eye, and he begins to cry. Percival’s crying reminds Maurice of a time before he was stranded on the island when his parents scolded him for kicking sand in a smaller boy’s eye. The memory makes Maurice uncomfortable because it reminds him that he has done something wrong. He has violated the moral code of conduct that his parents had been trying to instill in him as a part of civilized society. Roger experiences a similar feeling when he begins to throw stones at Henry. There’s an area around Henry that Roger will not cross because it violates the code of conduct ingrained in him by his parents, his school, and the laws of the civilization he once inhabited. This behavior suggests that one of the darker, more violent impulses in human nature is for the strong to prey on the weak, but that these impulses can be contained by the rules of civilization and thus weeded out of people, or at least kept in check.

After Jack apologizes, Ralph “asserts his chieftainship” by issuing an order instead of granting forgiveness. He tells the hunters to light the fire and then he stands silently in their way and doesn’t move until they’re done. The hunters are inconvenienced by Ralph’s presence while they’re trying to rebuild the fire, and they end up having to put it in a less convenient place. I think this gesture is effective because it places Ralph in a position of power. By ignoring Jack’s apology and ordering the hunters to rebuild the fire, he shows that he won’t compromise his authority or change his priorities because of the desires of the other boys. Then, by standing in the hunters’ way and making their work harder than it needs to be, he shows them that their lives will be more difficult if they disobey him. Ralph’s behavior in this moment makes the other boys see him as a strong chief who needs to be obeyed.  

During the1950s in England, men wore their hair short. The country was still recovering from World War II, and crew cut hairstyles were popular because they were low-maintenance and easy. Older men during this time period tended to be conservative. They styled themselves as traditionally masculine. These fashions are important to know because Lord of the Flies was published in the early 1950s, and the stranded boys were British children. The civilization they long for and try to recreate is that of 1950s Britain. Therefore, chapter four’s title, Painted Faces and Long Hair, highlights how far they’ve gone from social norms. All of the boys except Piggy have long hair by this point in the novel, and the hunters have painted their faces in ways that seem animalistic and tribal. These changes (and the title of the chapter that reflects them) are thematically significant because they show the boys slipping further away from civilization and going deeper into an untamed, primitive world.

The “beast from air” is the body of a dead pilot attached to a parachute. The body is still attached to the parachute lines, and the wind is moving it up and down, positioning it and repositioning it like a marionette doll. The boys see this moving corpse in the light of the fire in the shadows of the early morning and, in their terror and confusion, they understandably mistake it for a beast. Ironically, at the end of chapter five, Ralph and Piggy had gone to bed wishing for a sign from the grown ups. As Piggy had said, “grownups know things [...] they ain’t afraid of the dark. They’d meet and have tea and discuss. Then things ‘ud be all right.” However, neither of them were aware that there was a dogfight happening in the air above them that night. At the beginning of chapter six, when the body of the dead pilot floated down to the island, the novel described it as the sign the boys had asked for. The boys are desperate to believe that civilization and the grownup world will protect them from the darkness and savagery in human nature, but in actuality, the grown up world (the civilization the boys long for) is at war. This fact complicates the novel’s themes and symbolizes that society is fragile. Just as the boys are struggling to keep order on the island, the larger world is also struggling to keep order. 

Sam and Eric’s description of the beast tells us that fear can distort human perception of things. The boys were so afraid when they saw the pilot’s body that they couldn’t recognize what they were actually seeing, so their minds reinterpreted the images based on their fear. For example, they saw the parachute moving behind the pilot’s head and their minds understood it to be wings. The human mind wants to understand and categorize things, even if that means taking something that is out of place and reinterpreting it into something that makes more sense. In this case, Sam and Eric are not expecting to see a grown up pilot’s corpse attached to a parachute in the middle of the island. Instead, they see what they expect to see: the beast the whole island has been afraid of since the day they arrived. As they flee, the pilot is not chasing them, but their extreme fear makes the “beast” feel very close. In fear, their minds also exaggerate the details, which they then relate to the other boys as absolute facts.

Most of the boys see the castle as an exciting place to build a fort. The “castle” seems like a fun adventure and a good place for them to play. This scene also seems to parallel the boys’ first exploration, when the boys went up the mountain and pushed the rock over the edge. Just as Ralph, Jack, and Simon were excited to push a boulder off the mountain in chapter one, now the other boys want to push a boulder from the castle off the side of the cliff. However, this time Ralph is not interested and sees it as a waste of time. While Jack and the other boys are excited about the castle, Ralph sees it as a rotten place. At the end of the chapter, Ralph is trying to regain control over the boys (who are not interested in going back up the mountain to rebuild the  signal fire), but the boys are reluctant and mutinous. Jack seems to be asserting himself as a leader in this scene, and he even suggests building a camp at the castle. Jack’s growing leadership alongside Ralph’s seeming decline (along with the fact that there are now two possible campsites) might foreshadow a future split between the boys and possibly even another tribe forming on the island.

 

Ralph sees the rules as the boys’ last tie to civilization. In Ralph’s view, to break the rules is to give up on what little order the boys have left. Breaking the rules means they have given up on trying to remember their old lives. Ralph is sure that if they abandon the rules, the boys will destroy their last chance to be rescued and consign themselves to life on the island forever. After all, when the hunters broke the rules and let the fire go out, the boys lost their chance to be rescued by the only ship that had passed by in their entire time on the island. Some of Ralph’s rules seem unnecessary. For example, he mentions that the boys are no longer keeping fresh water in coconut shells and are instead drinking directly from the pool by the waterfall in the river, but even Ralph agrees that the water is better directly from the river. Other rules, however, seem critically important. For instance, following the rules about where to go to the bathroom is essential to staving off illness and maintaining hygiene standards on the island. Ralph is afraid that if the boys give into their wild natures they will lose their connection with civilization and give up on going back to the world they left behind, which terrifies him because Ralph still desperately clings to the hope of rescue. 

At the end of the chapter, the boys have taken off after Jack, screaming and laughing as they scramble away, leaving the assembly in tatters. Piggy tells Ralph to blow the conch and assert his dominance, but Ralph is afraid that the boys will not listen to the conch if he blows it now. Ralph knows that after the conch has been ignored once, it will lose all its meaning and value, and the boys will have lost the last structure they had. The conch is the last thing keeping the boys tethered to civilization on the island. Ralph is terrified that no one will respect the conch anymore. He knows that if the boys ignore it once, they can easily ignore it again, until the conch (and the society it symbolizes) has lost all value. Piggy, however, cautions Ralph that without the reminder of the conch the boys will descend into animalistic behavior anyway. 

At this point in the novel, the only biguns left on Ralph’s side are Sam and Eric, Ralph himself, and Piggy. Ralph is having trouble remembering why they need smoke, and he is losing the eloquence and confidence that led the boys to elect him as chief in the first place. Piggy has been blinded by the loss of his glasses, which Jack’s tribe stole in a raid the night before. The twins are deeply afraid of Jack, and they have lost their confidence in Ralph. In contrast, Jack has displayed his power and garnered a strong group of followers. He has lost his self-consciousness thanks to the war paint, and he has had several successful hunts and a grand feast. His tribe is unified and strong while Ralph’s is weakened and broken. Because Jack has so successfully eclipsed Ralph, the mission to reclaim the glasses and convince the other boys to maintain a signal fire is doomed.

Before the boys set off for Castle Rock, Ralph is struggling to communicate. He’s even struggling to remember what he’s been so desperate to achieve on the island. He keeps forgetting why it’s important to tend to the fire. Ralph is embarrassed and defensive when Piggy tries to help him remember. After this moment, we are told that “[t]he twins were examining Ralph curiously, as though they were seeing him for the first time.” The twins are beginning to see Ralph more clearly. He is a struggling child who is trying hard to maintain order. He is not a grown-up or a man, or even a particularly strong leader. The twin’s faith in Ralph is shaken. They are already afraid of Jack, with his anger and his war paint, and now they are beginning to worry that Ralph will not be able to ease the coming conflict.

If you think about it, the four main boys in the story -- Simon, Piggy, Ralph, and Jack -- each represent one aspect of human nature. Simon represents human goodness, Piggy represents human intelligence, Ralph represents man’s quest for civilization, and Jack represents man’s instinct to survive. Each of the boys (and their accompanying characteristic) is also associated with a physical object or place on the island. Simon’s goodness is associated with the clearing, Piggy’s intelligence is associated with his glasses, Ralph's quest for order, justice, and civilization is associated with the conch shell, and Jack’s instinct to survive is associated with his spear. Life on the island starts to deteriorate fast after Simon’s clearing is sullied by the hunt (when the boys leave the pig’s head behind as an offering for the beast). Soon after that moment, Simon is killed. Symbolically, this represents the loss of goodness on the island. Next, Piggy’s glasses are broken in the raid, and then Piggy is also killed. (Piggy’s association with intelligence is underscored by the manner of his death: his brains are literally bashed out by the rock.) At this point, human goodness and intelligence have both been lost. Interestingly, Piggy is holding the conch shell when he dies. The fall that kills Piggy also destroys the conch shell. Because the conch shell is the physical representation of civilization on the island, its destruction symbolizes the loss of hope: the boys will never be able to recreate their civilization. At best, a civilization without intelligence and goodness would be ineffective and confused. And in fact, at this point in the novel Ralph himself has become increasingly ineffective and confused. Without Simon and Piggy, and without the conch shell, Ralph’s life is threatened almost immediately. All that is left for anyone on the island is the instinct to survive. (If the boys had been able to work together on the island, each of their strengths would have been important and necessary, and we would have had a very different novel!)

The twins, Sam and Eric, are originally the only ones (aside from Piggy) who stay with Ralph instead of leaving to follow Jack. However, during the confrontation between Ralph and Jack they are taken prisoner by the other boys. At first, neither twin wants to join Jack’s tribe. However, Roger (the boy who killed Piggy and broke the conch shell) and Jack do not let the twin’s decision stand. Jack and Roger are authoritarian leaders who rule their tribe through violence, and the novel has already established that the twins are afraid of these more aggressive boys. The novel has also already established that the twin’s faith in Ralph has been shaken. They are no longer confident that Ralph will win. Roger then beats the twins until they’re compliant. The twins are unwilling members of Jack’s tribe, but they are so afraid of Jack and Roger they tell them where Ralph is hiding anyway. The twins have given up hope of recreating their civilization and now, like everyone else, they’re just trying to survive.

After returning to Castle Rock to speak to Sam and Eric, Ralph hides in a thicket close to the other boy’s fortress, and he shelters in a trench that was created by the rock that killed Piggy. He is still afraid of the beast and he thinks it’s better to hide near the other boys, just in case. Hiding here makes Ralph feel clever and secure, and it symbolizes his connection to Piggy. He also still believes the other boys will help protect him if they’re faced with a greater threat, such as the beast. Later, when the other boys are hunting him and Ralph is fleeing for his life, he unknowingly hides in the same small shelter under a mat of creepers that Simon retreated to in chapter three. This hiding place symbolizes Ralph’s connection to Simon. Taken together, Ralph’s two hiding places symbolize the idea that civilization, which is represented by Ralph, cannot survive without intelligence and goodness, as symbolized by Piggy and Simon.

The boys are saved after a passing ship sees the smoke they created by setting the island on fire in pursuit of Ralph. This is ironic because throughout the entire novel, Ralph has been fixated on building a large signal fire so they will have a hope of being rescued. Now that he has become an outcast and is about to die, the very thing he hoped for comes true. I think the fact that the boys are British is important because of the British people’s view of themselves and their place in the world historically. If you think back to the late 1800s, the British (along with other countries) were colonizing the world and justifying it with the ideas of Social Darwinism, or the concept that some races and cultures are inherently superior to others and have a moral duty to assimilate weaker cultures. Even though Lord of the Flies wasn’t written until the 1950s, these ideas lingered. Many British people still saw themselves as part of a superior culture, and they would have expected a group of British boys to survive life on the island easily because of this superiority. Golding may have chosen to write about a group of British boys as a way to challenge this idea. The boys’ transformation into savages shows that no group of people is fundamentally different, and I think perhaps Golding chose to write about a group of British boys to show that just because someone belongs to a specific group, that doesn’t change their innate nature. Throughout the novel, Golding seems to show his reader that the various aspects of human nature are innate to all cultures and that civilization cannot survive when these aspects are divided.  

The biguns seem to define a proper chief as someone who is physically powerful and can protect the tribe; someone who can help them survive. Jack protects the boys from intruders, provides meat for them, and claims to keep them safe from the beast. He is a brutal and violent leader, but he provides the boys with a sense of safety and security on the island. He even comes up with a rudimentary religion to soothe their existential anxieties: leaving a portion of every hunt as an offering to the beast.This criterion suggests that humans have an overwhelming instinct to survive and they want to feel safe from the unknown. The boys are willing to tolerate almost anything (even an unstable, authoritarian ruler) to ensure their survival and soothe their fears. 

In this chapter, Ralph, Piggy, and the twins are all processing the events of the night before, where they attended Jack’s feast and the group killed Simon. As the tension of the novel builds, we can clearly see their stress and fear. We see them laughing for no reason, shaking, shivering, avoiding eye contact with each other, and shuddering at physical contact. After the feast, Ralph has lost his confidence. He’s preoccupied with the horror on the island and he’s struggling to remember his purpose. The other boys notice Ralph’s decline and, even though Piggy tries to help him, their faith in him as a leader is shaken.The dance and the death from the night before have taken a heavy psychological toll on the boys, and without Ralph’s strong, reassuring presence, the boys know they have very little chance of reasoning with Jack and maintaining order on the island. 

Roger doubts Jack after he learns that Jack is going to beat Wilfred. The novel never gives the reader a reason for Wilfred’s punishment, but we are told that Roger “received the news as an illumination.” At this moment, Roger realizes that Jack’s authority will be more violent and less controlled than Ralph’s leadership. The novel tells us that Roger sits on a rock and considers the possibilities of “irresponsible” leadership. Clearly, Roger faces a moment of doubt about Jack, but he never challenges the new chief. Instead, Roger seems to thrive under Jack’s “irresponsible” leadership, and he allows himself to indulge increasing levels of brutality later in the novel. In fact, if certain boys are viewed as representations of various aspects of human nature (goodness, intelligence, civilization/justice, and the instinct to survive), under Jack’s leadership Roger may begin to represent humanity’s capacity for evil. Roger is a minor character in the beginning of the novel, but he is the one with the greatest capacity for violence and cruelty in the end.