Chapters 7-9: Savagery & Simon's Death
Chapter 7: Shadows and Tall Trees
As the boys trek across the island to find the beast, Ralph looks at the vast, indifferent ocean and experiences a moment of existential dread. He realises the sea is ‘the divider, the barrier’. For the first time, Ralph fully grasps that rescue may never come. This is Golding at his most psychologically acute: the moment a child understands the reality of their situation is the moment hope begins to die.
During the expedition, a boar charges the group and Ralph jabs it with a spear. He is thrilled: ‘He sunned himself in their new respect and felt that hunting was good after all.’ This is a crucial moment — even Ralph, the representative of civilisation, feels the primal excitement of violence. Golding refuses to let any character remain morally clean. Afterwards, the boys re-enact the hunt with Robert standing in as the pig. The game becomes dangerously real: ‘Robert squealed in mock terror, then in real pain’. The transition from play to genuine violence happens in a single sentence. This foreshadows Simon’s murder in Chapter 9.
Ralph’s excitement during the boar hunt proves that the impulse towards violence exists in every boy, not just Jack. Golding uses this to argue that savagery is a universal human trait, not a flaw in particular individuals. Even the novel’s moral centre is susceptible.
Chapter 8: Gift for the Darkness
Jack calls an assembly and attempts to overthrow Ralph. When the boys refuse to vote Ralph out directly, Jack storms off: ‘I’m not going to play any longer. Not with you.’ The childish phrasing (‘play’, ‘not with you’) is deliberately jarring against the lethal consequences of his departure. Jack forms his own tribe at Castle Rock, and the hunters kill a sow in a scene of graphic, sexualised violence: ‘Right up her ass!’ Roger drives his spear in with deliberate cruelty. They mount the sow’s head on a stick as an offering to the beast — this becomes the Lord of the Flies.
Simon, alone in his clearing, encounters the rotting head. In a hallucinatory scene, the Lord of the Flies ‘speaks’ to him: ‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ It continues: ‘You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you?’ This is the novel’s philosophical climax. The beast is not an animal or a parachutist — it is the darkness inside every person. Simon faints, overwhelmed by this truth.
The title ‘Lord of the Flies’ is a translation of the Hebrew word Beelzebub, a name for the Devil. Golding’s title is therefore a statement about evil: the Devil is not an external supernatural force but exists within human nature itself. The pig’s head, swarming with flies and grinning ‘cynically’, is a physical manifestation of this internal evil. It does not create the boys’ savagery — it simply confirms what Simon already suspects.
Chapter 9: A View to a Death
Simon wakes and climbs the mountain, where he discovers the truth about the beast: it is merely a dead parachutist tangled in his harness. The wind inflates the parachute, making the body appear to move. Simon, carrying this truth, stumbles down to the beach where Jack’s tribe is feasting and dancing in a thunderstorm. They are chanting ‘Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!’
When Simon crawls out of the forest, the boys are in a frenzy. They mistake him for the beast — or perhaps they know exactly what he is but cannot stop. They fall on him: ‘There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.’ Golding strips the murder of humanity: ‘teeth and claws’ describes animals, not children. Simon’s body is carried out to sea in a passage of haunting beauty: ‘the great wave of the tide moved further along the island and the water lifted him. Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon’s dead body moved out toward the open sea.’ The contrast between the brutal murder and this lyrical, almost sacred departure is devastating.
Simon’s murder is the novel’s moral catastrophe. He is killed while trying to bring the truth — that the beast is not real — to the other boys. His death parallels the crucifixion of Christ: a good person murdered for speaking an inconvenient truth. The beautiful sea passage elevates Simon to a near-sacred status in death.
The thunderstorm that rages during Simon’s murder is powerful pathetic fallacy. The storm mirrors the boys’ frenzy — chaotic, uncontrollable, destructive. Lightning illuminates the scene in flashes, creating a nightmarish strobe effect. After the murder, the storm breaks the body of the parachutist free and blows it out to sea, symbolically removing the ‘beast’ that the boys feared. But it is too late: they have already committed the very evil they were afraid of.