William Golding's Lord of the
Flies the theme of Appearance vs. Reality runs throughout the narrative. It
is introduced as Ralph looks around and is
forced at last to believe in the reality of the
island laughed delightedly again and stood on his head....Here at last was the imagined
but never fully realized place leaping into real
life.
This delight and "vivid
phantoms of his day-dream" stands in sharp contrast to the reality of Ralph's tearful
acknowledgement of the loss of innocence at the novel's
conclusion.
Later in Chapter One as the boys explore the
island, Golding writes that they come upon a pink
granite
stack
of balanced rock projecting through the looped fantasy of the forest creepers. Where
the pink cliffs rose out of the ground there were often narrow track winding
upwards.
This illusion of
tropical beauty is later disturbed by the reality of hunting the pigs who have made
these trails, and the killing of Piggy by the jetting of one of the great pink boulders,
just like the one which shakes "as with the passage of an enraged monster"
when the boys push it off onto his head in this chapter. The forest creepers, "the
curtain of creepers," are not a fantasy, but rather symbolic of the insidious evil of
the atavistic evil lying in the souls of the civilized
boys.
This theme of Appearance vs. Reality runs throughout
Golding's narrative: In Chapter Two Jack "passes like a shadow under the darkness of
the tree." Also representative of the theme are the references to the bright beach
where the sun is blinding, the "illusions of the lagoon" in Chapter Three and the
bathing pool where the boys meet in comaradery. In fact, the prevalent light/dark
imagery suggests the dfference between illusion and reality. For instance, Golding
alludes to the reflection of light upon Piggy's glasses ("the flash of Piggy's glasses
in Chapter Four) and the "opaque look in Jack's eyes" (4) In this same chapter, Golding
writes,
They
grew accustomed to these mysteries and ignored them, just as they ignored the miraculous
throbbing stars. At midday the illusion merged into the sky and the sun gazed down like
an angry eye....menaced by the coming of the dark. When the sun sank, darkness dropped
on the island like an extinguisher and soon the
shelter...
In other passages,
Golding alludes to the flash of Piggy's glasses in contrast to the
opaque
Certainly the description of the sadistic Roger in
Chapter Four underlies the deception of civilization. For, while Roger does not hit
little Henry at whom he throws stones--"that object of preposterous time"--once the
vestiges of civilization erode, the reality of Roger's intrinsic evil is evidenced in
his slaughter of Piggy, the rational being.
The recognition
of the dilemma of what is real and what is not is clearly evidenced in Ralph's thoughts
in Chapter Four as he rolls on his stomach and
...pretended
not to see. The mirages had died away and gloomily he ran his eye along the taut blue
line of the horizon. In Chapter Five, Ralph waits as he has called a late afternoon
meeting:
They
had never had an assembly as late before. That was why the place looked so different.
Normally the underside of the green roof was lit by a tangle of golden reflections, and
their faces were lit upside down [appearance]...But now the sun was slanting in at one
side, so the shadows were where they ought to be
[reality]Again he fell into that strange mood of
speculation....If faces were different when lit from above or below--what was a face?
What was anything?
Of course,
the Beast, the Lord of the Flies, is the most salient emblem of the theme of Appearance
vs. Reality. For, the boys attribute different forms to him: a snake, something in the
sky, and the pig's head. Only Simon recognizes the true nature of the
"beast":
"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?"
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