18. LORD OF THE FLIES: LOSS OF INNOCENCE Sakshi Prahari (Research Scholar) Guide- Dr. Savita Singh Pt. Ravi Shankar University, Raipur (C.G.) Abstract William Golding, the Noble Prize winner novelist, is a great British writer and his novels are purely psychological in nature. His first novel Lord of the Flies is a very famous one which deals with the psychology of the characters. A group of boys stranded on an uninhabited island and how they turned into savages and killed some of their own friends is the main theme of the novel. Golding has given the importance of rules and regulations in human lives through this novel. This paper aims to analyze this novel through Sigmund Freud s psychoanalytic theory of id, ego and superego. Keywords- psychological, analyze, uninhabited, savages, id, ego, superego. Lord of the Flies is the first and widely acclaimed novel of Sir William Golding. It was published in the year 1954. Golding took the idea of this novel from Robert Ballantyne s The Coral Island in which three English boys try to create an idyllic society after being shipwrecked on a deserted island. Lord of the Flies is also set on an uninhabited island where a group of English boys reached after a plane crash due to the atomic war which was going on. The group includes the boys of age group 6-12 years without the supervision of any adult. In the beginning, the boys were disciplined, wanted to survive on the island and wanted to be rescued, but as their time span on the island increased, the evil inside them came out and they started behaving like savages and killed some of the boys of their own group. Some of the marooned characters are ordinary students, while others arrive as a musical choir under an established leader. Most of them appear as they never to have encountered one another before. The book portrays their descent into savagery; left to themselves in a paradisiacal country, far from modern civilisation, the well-educated children regress to a primitive state. William Golding had a close preoccupation with evil and he had the same approach like that of Angus Wilson on this subject. Angus has written his views on the nature of evil in his article called Evil in the English Novel which says: I have been led to suppose that one of the troubles is that we are too much concerned with right and wrong, and not enough with evil. As an agnostic writer with apprehensions of evil over and above my ideas of right and wrong, I have been concerned to try to find ways of introducing evil into my novels. (167) 93
Golding too had the same concern as that of Angus and had diagnosed the ills of human nature throughout his life. He tried to study the permanent nature of man and also his behaviour in relation to his cosmic situation. In one of his essays named Belief and Creativity: A Moving Target, he writes: What man is whatever man is under the eye of heaven, that I burn to know and that I do not say this lightly I would endure knowing. The themes closest to my purpose, to my imagination have stemmed from that preoccupation, have been of such a sort that they might move me a little nearer that knowledge. They have been themes of man at an extremity, man tested like building material, taken into the laboratory and used to destruction; man isolated, man obsessed, man drowning in a literal sea or in the sea of his own ignorance. (199) At an allegorical level, the central theme of the novel is the conflicting human impulses toward civilization living by rules, peacefully and in harmony and towards the will to power. Themes include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, between innocence and savagery and between morality and immorality. How these play out, and how different people feel the influences of these, form a major subtext of Lord of the Flies. The name "Lord of the Flies" is the literal translation of the word Beelzebub who was the representative of Satan in Milton s Paradise Lost. Lord of the Flies has a clear psychological approach which is based on the theory given by Sigmund Freud regarding human personality which consists of three different elements, the id, the ego and the superego. He has given the theory of basic urges in which he tells that man has certain innate and unlearnt urges which are the urges and desires of the id. According to this theory the id is that aspect of personality which is driven by internal and basic needs and drives. They are typically instinctual like hunger, thirst and the drive for sex or libido. It is impulsive and often unaware of implications of actions due to its instinctual quality as the desires of the id are mainly unconscious and are largely repressed basically in the childhood. The id acts in accordance to the pleasure principle in which it avoids pain and seeks for pleasure. A child is born with this pleasure and pain principle which is guided by the id and as he grows up, the ego and the superego develop out of the id and thus the child further grows with them. The ego modifies and acts as a mediator and brings a harmony between the id and the superego. In the novel, the major characters, Jack, Ralph and Piggy are symbolising the id, the ego and the superego respectively and Ralph always tries to maintain a balance between Piggy and Jack. The novel takes place in the midst of a wartime evacuation where a British plane crashes near an uninhabited and isolated island in a remote region of the Pacific Ocean. The only survivors are boys in their middle childhood or preadolescence. Two boys, Ralph and Piggy, find a conch, which Ralph uses like a horn to call all the survivors at one place. As Ralph is the one who is responsible for bringing all the survivors together, he is quickly elected as their chief. The red-headed boy Jack organises his choir group into a hunting party which will be responsible for discovering a food source. The semblance of order quickly deteriorates as most of the 94
boys turn idle, giving little aid in building shelters, and begin to develop paranoiacs about the island, referring to a supposed monster which they named as the beast, and which they start believing to exist on the island. Ralph insists that no such beast exists, but Jack, who has started a power struggle with Ralph, gains control of the discussion by boldly promising to kill the beast. One night, an aerial battle occurs over the island while the boys lay asleep, during which a dead pilot is ejected from his plane. His body, while drifting in air, comes down to the island in his parachute and get tangled in a tree near the top of the mountain. Later on the boys see the corpse and mistaking it for the beast; they run to warn the others. Simon, who is likely an epileptic, wanders off to think and finds a severed pig head, left by Jack as an offering to the beast. Simon confronts the pig head which is now swarming with the flies, as the Lord of the Flies and thinks that it is talking to him. The pig's head tells Simon that the boys themselves have created the beast and that the real beast resides inside them. Simon decides to go to the mountain and locates the dead parachutist who had been mistaken for the beast. Simon, in the hope of disclosing the discovery, finds Jack's tribe in the interior part of the island during a ritual dance and the worst thing happens on the island as Simon is mistaken for the beast by the frenzied boys and is killed. Ralph, Piggy, Sam, and Eric feel guilty that they, too, participated in the murder of Simon. Jack and his group of savages decide that they should grasp Piggy's glasses, the only means of starting a fire on the island and so they attack Ralph's camp and confiscate the glasses. Ralph, accompanied by Piggy, Sam, and Eric move to Castle Rock and demand that they should return Piggy s glasses. Turning against Ralph, Jack s followers make Sam and Eric as their captive while Roger drops down a boulder upon Piggy and thus killing him on the spot and shattering the conch. Ralph, somehow, manages to escape, but Sam and Eric are tortured by Jack s tribe until they agree to be its members. The next morning, Jack orders his boys to begin a manhunt for Ralph. Jack and his savages set fire to the forest while Ralph desperately tries to find out a way for survival. Following a long chase, most of the island set on fire and with the hunters closely behind, Ralph trips and falls. When he looks up, a uniformed naval officer, whose party has landed from a passing warship to investigate the fire, was standing in front of Ralph. Ralph bursts into tears over the death of Piggy and the end of innocence on the island. Infected by his emotion the other children also spontaneously erupt into sobs. The officer expresses his disappointment that the British boys had fallen into such feral behaviour and turns away to give them a moment to pull themselves together and thus the story comes to an end. William Golding has always tried to communicate a vision of reality in his fiction. He is of the view that evil emanates from man himself in the form of darkness which inhabits the core of man s being. Slowly this darkness becomes the central organizing principle of a man s personality by controlling his character. It takes the form of egoism which leads to pride, hatred, immorality, sin which bring nothing but the ruin of the individual. The darkness in the human heart has led man farther and farther away from the root of his being. An isolated person s sense of his innermost 95
self is Golding s metaphor for depicting this spiritual experience like man s cognizance of his innermost self in front of a pig s head as in the novel Lord of the Flies. Piggy and Simon both tried to bring out the bitter truth in front of the boys that man himself is the beast and has fallen to such a low level because of his corrupt nature that he has become more frightening than any other living thing but, the boys, like their elders in the real world, were not prepared and ready to admit to this fact and continued their debate. However, both of them were not wrong. Good and evil is within the man and he can make his life a heaven or a hell according to the qualities that he himself possesses or projects the most. Though, by nature, man is sinful but Golding insists that he must learn to live without greed and selfishness. In an interview with James Baker included in the book, An Interview with William Golding: Twentieth Century Literature, Golding said: I remember alluding in passing to the idea of original sin and I suppose allowing it to be inferred that I believe in original sin and somebody else there, a scientist, really got rather angry... he said all this talk about original sin is absolutely nonsense, that man is a creature who suffers from an innate inability to live a proper and satisfactory life in a social circumstance. And I said, well, that s an elaborate definition of original sin and I cannot, I have never been able to see how anybody can deny what stares us in the face- unless we control ourselves, we sin. Our nature is to want to grab something that belongs to somebody else, and we have either to be taught or teach ourselves that you ve got to share, you can t grab the lot. And for God s sake, history is really no more than a chronicle of original sin. (134-35) It is human nature only that gives rise to sin which is not a cosmic accident because it clings to egoism and combative animalist behaviour. Even animals fail to be as viciously cruel, persistently wicked and dangerously violent and greedy as man has shown himself capable of in the last few years and what the small boys have shown on the island in Lord of the Flies. The novel is loaded with many modern elements and Freud s theory of psychoanalysis is one of the most striking modern features used by Golding and it is depicted through the behaviour of various characters. The three levels of consciousness can be observed in the story as Golding presents the conflicting personalities of the key characters, representing the elements of Freud's concept. However, the divisions are not structural parts of the brain but are three aspects of the way the mind thinks. The novel begins with the conflict between three boys, Jack, Ralph and Piggy which shows three divisions of mind. The very first form of thinking illustrated is id. It is the state of mind in which one thinks only to get pleasure and leads a person to act on his urges and satisfy his needs irrespective of anything or anyone. In Lord of the Flies Jack clearly represents the concept of id overpowering the ego and the superego. From the beginning, Jack is presented as a violent character following his 96
desires, killing others only to get pleasure and taking negative steps most of the times. Jack found pleasure in violence as his thoughts are reflected in the second chapter in the scene when Ralph was setting rules for everyone to maintain discipline. Jack was not interested in obeying those rules but he was excited with the thought of violent punishment for the one who would break them as he says, We ll have rules! he cried excitedly. Lots of rules! Then when any one breaks em--- (36). Another area of interest for Jack was killing. Every moment the first thought that came to his mind was to kill or to hunt. In the discussion regarding the beast, his words, There isn t a snake thing. But if there was a snake we d hunt it and kill it. We re going to hunt pigs and get meat for everybody. And we ll look for the snake too- (36) show that he was obsessed with such thoughts of killing and hurting others. He was always led by his id rather than ego or super ego. When the story begins, Jack shows a bit sensible behaviour but that doesn t remain constant. At one occasion, before started killing he tried to maintain his civility,...we ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we re not savages. We re English; and the English are best at everything. So we ve got to do the right things (43-44). This conversation shows a glimpse of civic sense in his personality but it soon fades away when he let his desires to drive him and he himself gave a way to id to overpower him. Another occasion was when he went out with Ralph and Simon to have a look at the island, he confronted a pig but was not able to stab him because of a little bit mercy he had in his heart but he didn t accept that and said, I was going to,... I was choosing a place. Next time-!... Next time there would be no mercy (30) and after that he became so much indulged in hunting that he cared for none. The time when a ship came, he had gone for hunting along with his group of hunters. Later on he was cursed by all of them as they could have been saved if he did not let the fire out. It is clear that Jack s carelessness and greed for desires became a reason of losing a chance of their rescue. Jack only wanted to fulfil all his desires, even if they were not allowed or accepted by the society and his main purpose on the island was to have fun and pleasure. According to Freud id is only responsible for our basic needs such as food and water and it seeks to avoid pain or unpleasantness. The same thing is depicted here in the novel when the boys used to chant, Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Bash her in (81), but this was not a basic need. It was very violent and futile and only meant to gain pleasure. The most important thing is it is quite abnormal to have a desire to kill others, but the worst is to act upon it and Jack did so to a mother sow, The great bladder of her belly was fringed with a row of piglets that slept or burrowed and squeaked...jack was on top of the sow, stabbing downward with his knife The spear moved forward inch by inch and the terrified squealing became a high-pitched scream. Then Jack found the throat and the hot blood spouted over his hands. The sow collapsed under them and they were heavy and fulfilled upon her. (150-152) The death of any animal on the island seemed unnecessary as there was plenty of other things to survive and that too the pig that was a mother and was nursing several piglets and the way they killed her was totally animalistic. They could have maintained their civility by limiting their lust for food but they couldn t stop 97
themselves and this event became the turning point i.e. a turn from civilization to savagery, which is obviously created by dominance of id in the personalities of the boys. Moreover, if the death of the pig was necessary, it wouldn t have to be killed in such a violent manner as Jack did. All these actions show that id overpowered Jack and his followers. There was one more character portraying the Freud idea of id which is Roger. He also followed his desires many times and caused death and destruction and even teased the littluns, all this he was doing just for the sake of pleasure. His thoughts and actions showed the dominance of id over ego and super ego in his personality. Later, id completely dominates the ego when he brutally murdered Piggy:...Roger... leaned all his weight on the lever... The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee... Piggy...travelled through the air sideways from the rock... His head opened and stuff came out and turned red. Piggy s arms and legs twitched a bit, like a pig s after it has been killed...the body of Piggy was gone. (205-206) The murder of Piggy made it clear that Roger was completely acting on his instincts and he was acting on the pleasure principle rather than the reality or the morality. The next division of mind and form of thinking is ego. The ego has the abilities to calculate, reason, plan and process. According to Freud the ego is like a rider on a horse which represents the id, trying to hold the control on the horse. The ego always tries to satisfy the urges of id in a practical manner and thus maintains a balance between the id and the superego. In Lord of the Flies, Golding has represented Ralph as a true embodiment of ego. He was the most influential boy on the island as he thinks appropriately and has leadership quality. His main aim on the island was to be rescued and he knows better ways of being rescued too. The moment he was elected as the chief, he understood about Jack s desire to become a chief, I ought to be chief, said Jack with simple arrogance (19). He felt that the decision of the boys of appointing him the chief effected jack and made him embarrassed. Realizing that, Ralph gave him the control of the hunting group as stated in the novel, Ralph looked at him, eager to offer something. The choir belongs to you, of course.... The suffusion drained away from Jack s face (20). Here Ralph truly plays the role of ego and satisfies the urges of id in a socially accepted manner. He did what was allowed by the society and what was realistic in the true sense and at the same time he fulfilled the desire of Jack to be the leader to some extent. This reasonable step taken by Ralph had lessened the chance of enmity between the two as Jack and Ralph smiled at each other with shy liking (20). Ralph had a good sense of responsibility and consciousness too. His sense of responsibility is clearly revealed in his conversation with Piggy, Supposing I got like the others- not caring. What ud become of us? (157). He was more conscious and worried about the group rather than himself and his ultimate aim on the island was to save all the boys, but he failed to maintain discipline longer. It happened because the other boys could not suppress their desires for a long time. According to Freud, the very act of entering into civilized society entails the repression of various archaic primitive desires (Web). The repression of these desires was too difficult to maintain 98
for the boys for an extended period of time. The moment when Jack found that there was no one against Ralph and excluded him from the assembly, Ralph seemed quite tensed. Though Jack insulted him and Ralph could have enjoyed pleasure when Jack felt humiliated but Ralph kept control on himself and he seemed worried about his antagonist fellow as written in the novel, Softly, looking at Piggy and not seeing him, Ralph spoke to himself. He ll come back. When the sun goes down he ll come. (143). He was the elected leader of the group, so he was neutral and mostly tried to repress his feelings of hatred and anger as he wanted to deal with every situation wisely. He was always concerned about the long term consequences. The more superego side of the ego can be seen in Ralph s personality when he said: You pinched Piggy s specs. You ve got to give them back... You played a dirty trick- we d have given you fire if you d asked for it-... You could have had fire whenever you wanted. But you didn t. You came sneaking up like a thief and stole Piggy s glasses! (201) as he knew that stealing was wrong and demanded Jack to return Piggy s glasses so that he could see which depicted the two very righteous things in his personality. The third Freudian division of the human mind is the superego. According to Freud, superego represents our learned knowledge of right and wrong, moral and immoral, acceptable and unacceptable in the society in any given situation. In Lord of the Flies, Piggy and Simon are the two main characters who reflect the concept of superego most of the times. Piggy referred and quoted his aunt again and again in the beginning of the novel which shows that his superego was dominating him because of his aunt s restrictions as he told Ralph, My auntie told me not to run...on account of my asthma (3). The superego in Piggy s character made him quite sympathetic and sensible. Moreover, at the time of the assembly when a small boy wanted to tell about the beast, everyone was laughing at him but at that time Piggy was the only one who considered it wrong to make fun of him. Piggy s goodness of heart led him help the boy to convey his message effectively: The small boy held out his hands for the conch and the assembly shouted with laughter; at once he snatched back his hand and started to cry. Let him have the conch! shouted Piggy. Let him have it!... Piggy knelt by him, one hand on the great shell, listening and interpreting to the assembly. (35) which shows the impact of superego in Piggy s character. He was able to understand the feelings of other people. He was able to discriminate between right and wrong and he had the courage to choose the right way. This represents the influence of superego in his character. A Freudian explanation which reveals why the boys felt such a strong fear towards the beast is that their reality-testing apparatus had seized to function in a proper order. The nightmares would have remained only the nightmares and the thought of the beast would not have overpowered the kids if their reality-testing would have worked properly. Therefore, since the reality apparatus was not working properly, the evil force became more concrete for them. The thing to be noted is that 99
the idea of the beast first emerged in the minds of the littluns as it is common that the children mostly feel that an evil force is after them when they are away from their parents, and that exactly the case with the children on the island and one of the reasons why the older children did not start to believe in the beast at first because they had moved further in their psychological development due to their age, and therefore their reality-testing apparatus worked better than the smaller ones. Throughout the novel, it is presented that the id was continuously trying to overpower the ego and the superego and in the end the death of both Simon and Piggy showed that the beast-like-thing and evilness in the nature of human beings defeated the superego. Morality, truth and conscience became the victim of the beast inside human mind and the id overpowered everything. Human beings are very prone of committing mistakes and it hardly requires any effort to lose control over oneself and take a wrong turn in one s life. Any adverse situation is enough to initiate a man into the ways of the evil. A very strong determination and a sense of sacrifice are required to maintain the road of the good path and these are the men of noble thoughts and actions. As Golding has said in his essay Fable : It is that objective yet devoted stare with which humanity observes its own past; and in that stare, that attempt to see how things have become what they are, where they went wrong, and where right, that our only hope lies of having some control over our own future. (The Hot Gates. 90-91) Today man has changed a lot. Purity of thought, action and deed has gone and greed, deceit, cruelty, pride and longing for worldly pleasures have taken its place. Modern man has closed all the doors towards spirituality and the death of Piggy in Lord of the Flies is the end of superego on the island. The same is happening is today s world as man does not want to control his evil desires and wish to fulfil his lustful needs. To overcome this weakness, man has to control his senses and try to get rid of the evil inside him. Cleanliness of the soul is equally or rather more important than that of the body and for that it is very essential to wash the dust and dirt from within and outside the body to make it truly clean. Unfortunately, the present world has changed a lot and is almost divorced from lofty ideals and pious deeds. There is a vast difference between what we want from others and what we actually give. To make this world a better place to live, one has to develop a sense of togetherness, leave violence, free from deceit and should not lust for power and dominance. In short man has to live the prehistoric life who lived together happily without any conscious thought and did not indulge in any brutal acts and were harmonious in their dealings with each other. As said by V.V. Subbarao in his book William Golding: A Study, The tale in Lord of the Flies presents a world of enduring harmony and hints at the author s regressive longings for a lost Eden (98). Lord of the Flies is undoubtedly the most remarkable novel of William Golding which gives a message to the entire society that rules and regulations are an 100
integral part of human s life and everyone should follow the same for the smooth conduct of the life. As man is a social animal and human beings, while living in a society, have to control their instincts and must act according to the norms which are accepted by all, then only our earth will be a happier place to live in. While viewing the atrocities of today's world on television or internet, the starving children, the wars, the injustices, one cannot help but think that evil is rampant in the present scenario. Humans must be aware that evil is not an external force embodied in any society but it resides within each and every person. Man has both good qualities and faults. He must try to control these faults and focus on his good qualities in order to be a better person and make his society a better place for him and his fellow beings too. Works Cited Baker, James. An Interview with William Golding: Twentieth Century Literature. Summer Issue. 1982. Print. Bhattacharjee, Juthika. Exploring Fictional World of William Golding. New Delhi: Akansha Publishing House. 2011. Print. Golding, William. Belief and Creativity: A Moving Target. London: Faber. 1982. Print. Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. London: Faber and Faber Limited. 1954. Print. Golding, William. The Hot Gates. London: Faber and Faber. 1965. Print. http://www.academia.edu/10327431/freud_psychoanalysis_in_lord_of_flies Accessed on 5.3.2017 Subbarao, V.V. Willaim Golding: A Study. Bangalore: Sterline Publishers Pvt. Ltd. 1987. Print. Wilson, Angus. Evil in the English Novel. Kenyon Review 29. March, 1967. Print. 101