Chapters 7-9: Savagery & Simon's Death
Chapter 7: Shadows and Tall Trees
As the boys search for the beast on the mountain, Ralph experiences a disturbing moment of self-awareness. He notices his own filthy appearance — bitten nails, matted hair, torn clothes — and feels a deep longing for the civilised world: “He would like to have a bath, a proper wallow with soap… He discovered with a little fall of the heart that these were the conditions he took as normal now and that he did not mind.” This is Golding at his most subtle. Ralph is not horrified by his appearance; he has adapted to it. The standards of civilisation are slipping away without him even noticing.
During a rest, the boys play a hunting game using Robert as the pig. What begins as play quickly turns vicious. They jab Robert with spears, chanting “Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!” Robert screams in genuine pain and fear. Even Ralph gets caught up: “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.” This is devastating because Ralph — the novel’s most civilised character — feels the same primal urge to hurt. Golding’s point is explicit: the capacity for violence is universal, not limited to “bad” characters like Jack or Roger.
Ralph’s participation in the mock hunt is crucial evidence for Golding’s central argument. If even the most rational, democratic character feels “the desire to squeeze and hurt,” then the capacity for savagery is not a flaw of certain individuals — it is part of human nature itself.
Chapter 8: Gift for the Darkness
Jack challenges Ralph’s leadership directly, calling for a vote to remove him as chief. When the vote fails, Jack leaves in humiliation and tears: “I’m not going to play any longer. Not with you.” His use of the word “play” reveals how he sees the situation — as a game he is losing, not a matter of survival. But Jack’s departure is strategic. One by one, the other boys slip away to join him. By the end of the chapter, Jack has established his own tribe, with himself as chief — not through election but through the promise of hunting, feasting and protection from the beast.
Jack’s tribe conducts a brutal pig hunt, killing a sow that is nursing her piglets. The violence of the scene is explicitly sexual and deeply disturbing: the boys “wedded to her in lust,” and Roger drives his spear into her while Robert jeers “Right up her ass!” Golding uses this grotesque imagery to show that the hunters’ violence has moved far beyond practical necessity into something ritualistic, primal and obscene. They cut off the sow’s head and mount it on a sharpened stick as an offering to the beast — a “gift for the darkness.”
The killing of the nursing sow is Golding’s most graphic scene. The mother pig represents innocence and nurturing — her murder while feeding her young is an act of maximum cruelty. Mounting her head on a stake as a “gift for the darkness” transforms the hunters from boys catching food into something resembling a primitive religious cult making sacrificial offerings. The chapter title — “Gift for the Darkness” — suggests they are now serving evil rather than resisting it. Golding implies that the beast the boys fear is the very evil they are creating through their own actions.
Simon and the Lord of the Flies
Simon, alone in his secret clearing, discovers the pig’s head on its stick, surrounded by buzzing flies. Golding describes the head as “grinning” with “dim eyes” — an image of corruption and decay. The title of the novel, Lord of the Flies, is a translation of the Hebrew name Beelzebub — a name for the Devil. The pig’s head is therefore a physical manifestation of evil itself.
In a hallucinatory encounter, the Lord of the Flies “speaks” to Simon. It tells him: “You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?” This is the novel’s philosophical climax. The beast is not an external creature — it is the darkness within every human being. Simon has understood this intuitively since Chapter 5 (“maybe it’s only us”), but now Golding makes it explicit through this symbolic confrontation.
The Lord of the Flies tells Simon: “You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you?” This confirms the novel’s central argument: the beast is not an external monster but the capacity for evil that exists within every human being. The title Lord of the Flies translates to Beelzebub — the Devil — making the pig’s head a symbol of innate human evil.
Chapter 9: A View to a Death — Simon’s Murder
Simon crawls down the mountain after discovering that the “beast” is actually a dead parachutist. He stumbles onto the beach where Jack’s tribe is holding a feast. The boys are dancing and chanting in a circle: “Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!” The chant has evolved — “pig” has become “beast.” When Simon emerges from the darkness, the frenzied boys mistake him for the beast and fall on him. “There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.”
Simon’s murder is the novel’s moral catastrophe. He is the only character who knows the truth — that the beast is a dead man, that the real evil is within — and he is killed before he can share it. Golding presents Simon as a martyr figure, echoing Christ: he goes alone into the wilderness, confronts evil (the Lord of the Flies), discovers the truth, and is killed by the very people he tries to save. The boys’ collective violence — not one person’s act but a group frenzy — demonstrates how mob mentality destroys individual conscience.
After Simon’s murder, Golding gives him a lyrical, almost sacred funeral. The tide carries Simon’s body out to sea, surrounded by bioluminescent creatures that “made a moving patch of light” around him. The prose shifts from brutal violence to poetic beauty: “Somewhere over the darkened curve of the world the sun and moon were pulling; and the film of water on the earth planet was held, bulging slightly on one side while the solid core turned.” This cosmic perspective lifts Simon’s death beyond the island, suggesting a spiritual significance. The natural world honours Simon even as the boys destroy him. Golding implies that truth and goodness, though vulnerable, have a transcendent quality that savagery cannot ultimately extinguish.
The Significance of Group Violence
Simon’s death is a collective act. Every boy on the beach participates, including Ralph and Piggy, who later try to deny their involvement. Ralph says “That was murder” while Piggy insists “It was dark. There was that — that bloody dance.” Their guilt and denial are psychologically realistic — but Golding’s point is that the mob absorbed them all. This connects to the novel’s broader argument about deindividuation: in a group frenzy, individuals lose their separate identities and moral judgement. Even good people can commit terrible acts when swept up in collective violence.