Victoria Enea

When Good Settles into Evil

“Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else… Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, what happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?” This quote by Eudora Welty reveals that setting is the paramount aspect of any piece of literature. It serves not only as a background for the characters but can also be related to the actions in a story. Most importantly, setting is created and embellished through the author’s language and choice of words. In the novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding, the author’s rich and meaningful descriptions of the island’s setting are used as a way to foreshadow and parallel the conflict between the boys. Although the tropical paradise where the plane crashes is the general setting, Golding establishes several smaller locations on the island, namely, the beach, Castle Rock, and the jungle. All of these settings either foreshadow what is yet to come or are a significant part of the ongoing violence on the island. For instance, the beach shows the early order of civilization, while the jungle is a place of fire and destruction, made even more dark and evil by the presence of the Lord of the Flies. Thus, each setting demonstrates a different aspect of the boys’ hostility and conflict, which grow progressively less subtle throughout the novel.

The beach is the first setting introduced and acts as a place of beauty and harmony to represent the boys’ initial happiness and contentment together. Golding establishes the beach as a peaceful place of fun and leisure. The boys swim in the beautiful lagoon and coral reef, and the “littluns” build castles and play in the sand. The beach’s tranquil waters represent calmness and stillness and symbolize the boys’ innocence before the events of the story alter and transform them. The plants can also represent character aspects through Golding’s writing. For example, there are “young palm trees” which could stand for the youth and inexperience of the boys (who seem no older than twelve years old) and their growth into something different. The meetings on the beach are held on “a great platform of pink granite”. The conch shell, found on the beach, gives each boy holding it the right to speak and summons all the boys together as the symbol of the law and order of civilization. The beach is significant because it both starts the story, when Ralph and Piggy first discover it, and ends it as the place where the naval officer meets Ralph and rescues the boys. Therefore, the beach symbolizes the calm before the storm by foreshadowing the boys’ subsequent descent into violent savagery.

The jungle is a dark, sinister place filled with frightening visions and ghastly violence. Creepers and wild animals roam throughout the jungle, and it is the location of the chilling Lord of the Flies, a pig’s head on a stick left as an offering for the “beast.” The jungle is also where the actual conflict occurs. It is set on fire—innocent, living things are destroyed—to smoke out Ralph after the tribe of savages, led by Jack, tries to chase after and catch him. The first deaths occur in the jungle as well. A littlun with a birthmark disappears and dies there from being caught in an accidental fire, and the first pig (a sow) is killed there by Jack’s hunters. However, it has one peaceful spot: Simon’s sanctuary. It is a place “where more sunshine fell”, and Simon was “…in a little cabin screened off from the open space by leaves”. With the butterflies and flowers, this is the one place on the island where no blood is shed, separate from the savage violence and terror. The setting of the jungle not only shows the unfolding, murderous nature of the boys, but also how burning and destruction by fire mirrors a loss of human innocence, which becomes clearer during the events on Castle Rock.
Castle Rock, a towering, ominous precipice on the island, provides the setting for the boys’ final descent into savagery. Castle Rock’s overhanging ledges of rock provide shelter, and Jack is excited by his discovery of a “trickle of water”, which provides fresh drinking water for the tribe. This makes it the ideal headquarters and hideout for Jack and his barbaric tribe of former choir boys. Castle Rock has rocks of pink granite, just as the platform in the lagoon is one slab of flat, pink granite for meeting. However, these rocks are jagged and tall, which can symbolize the broken rock of war. They fortify and guard it by building up defenses against Ralph and his few adherents. It becomes the prominent place of hostility and bloodshed and the location of the boys’ ultimate decline into inhumanity and wickedness. The murder of Piggy happens on Castle Rock when a huge, falling boulder strikes him in the chest and causes him to fall to his death into the crashing, rough ocean waves which surround Castle Rock. Jack and the others cook the meat of the pigs they kill after building a fire on Castle Rock, and afterwards they perform tribal dances and chants, repeating “Kill the beast. Cut its throat. Spill its blood”. The boys also act out a grisly chase scene, with one acting as the pig and the other as the hunter. In addition, the conch shell is shattered on Castle Rock, signifying the destruction of order and civilization on the island and the completed conversion of the boys into violent savages as they abandon all morality and judgement and succumb to the evil inside them.

The transformational setting of Lord of the Flies can be applied to today’s modern society and world, which has both good and evil. Just as the boys hunted each other on the island and set the trees of the jungle on fire, so too can war or terrorism have a destructive impact on the Earth. For example, the falling boulders can be compared to bombs because of their killing power and the permanent marks left on the island itself. The setting, by depicting tranquility before violence and destruction, also shows what is possible: the peace and unity which existed before the boys descended into madness, violence, and bloodshed. If people would simply learn to love and appreciate the beauty of their own setting—that is, the world around them—perhaps they would not fall victim to the same savagery, cruelty, and heartlessness as the boys in Lord of the Flies.