Read as an allegory, the island setting of William
Golding's Lord of the Flies can be perceived as a type of Eden.
Upon his arrival, Ralph looks around him:
Here at last was the imagined but never fully
realized place leaping into real
life.
Upon discovering the
conch, Piggy instructs Ralph about blowing into the
shell:
Ralph
grasped the idea and hit the shell with air from his diaphragm. Immediately the thing
sounded. A deep, harsh note boomed under the palms, spread through the intricacies of
the forest and echoed back from the pink granite of the mountin. Clouds of birds rose
from the tree-tops and something squealed and ran in the
undergrowth.
As the boys
begin to explore the island,
The three boys walked briskly on the sand. The
tide was low and there was a strip of weed-strewn beach that was almost as firm as
road. A kind of glamour was spread over them and the scene and they were conscious of
the glamour and made happy by it....
Now towared the end of
the afternoon, the mirages were settling a little. They found the end of the island,
quite distinct, and not magicked out of shape or sense. There was a jumble of the usual
squareness, with one great block sitting out in the lagoon. Sea birds were nesting
there.
When the boys try
climbing the mountain, they notice that there is "jungly stuff" and pink
rock:
Some
unknown force had wrenched and shattered these cubes so that they lay askew, often piled
diminishingly on each other. The most usual feature of the rock was a pink cliff
surmounted by a skewed block; and that again surmounted, and that again, till the
pinkness became a 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
tracks winding upwards. They could edge along them, deep in the plant world, their
faces to the rock....Here the roots and stems of creeper were in such tangles that the
obys had to thread through them like pliant
needles.
The primitive island
with its pink granite and creepers appears tropical, especially as it is bounded by the
ocean and a lovely lagoon. The boys are excited as they explore,especially Ralph and
Jack and Simon. They push over one of the great rocks, and it sounds like "an enraged
monster" as it crashes to the ground. Ralph declares, "This belongs to us" as he and
the others notice a coral reef and find fruit and a piglet caught in the creepers. Jack
turns white as he is unable to kill the pig; he tells the others, "I was choosing a
place."
In the first chapter, the boys establish themselves
on a pristine island that is sure to lend itself to adventure, friendship, and
direction.
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