The role of the prophet changes with the society in which he lives. In Disneyfied America, a prophet is a visionary, telling his people what they can become; in Biblical times, a prophet was the voice of God, telling his people what they had to become to fulfill their covenant with God. In William Golding's Lord of the Flies, though, the prophet told his people nothing; he realized what they had already become, and he dared not tell them because he knew they would turn against him. Simon lived in knowledge and fear because his society denied the role of the prophet, and he did not fight it because he wanted so much to be part of that society.

The basic premise of Lord of the Flies is that humans naturally live in savagery and ignorance, without any idea of how to live and how to live together. It is the story of boys stranded on an island who must develop government to survive. Every detail of the story holds symbolism. For example, each character represents an aspect of civilized humanity; those who represent human nature survive, and those who are self-actualized--the scientists, the religious, the leaders--all die. The most terrifying death is that of Simon, who symbolizes the eyes of a blindfolded and stumbling people. He alone saw that the jungle, which represented freedom and the lack of civilization, was not to be feared but to be understood; he alone knew that the mythical Beast of the island, feared by all the boys, was in fact their own inherent savagery. (The title, Lord of the Flies, is in fact a translation of "Beelzebub," a name of the devil in the Judeo-Christian tradition). In a vision, the Beast told him : "Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! . . . You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you?. . . Get back to the others and we'll forget the whole thing" (143).

Simon, though he did not tell the other boys of his vision, was incapable of forgetting. He was the observant character, the quiet philosopher. He was often alone, sometimes by his own choice, and he liked to wander into the peaceful jungle. He sincerely cared about the other boys, sometimes helping the young ones to fetch fruit, yet "Simon turned away from them and went where the just perceptible path led him. Soon high jungle closed in" (56). He loved solitude and yet felt loneliness; he was alien to the other boys. The boys did not think anyone would be stupid enough to go into the jungle by night: "The assembly grinned at the thought of going out into the darkness. Then Simon stood up and Ralph looked at him in astonishment" (85). Many of the boys even thought he was "batty" because he left the group to spend time in a place they feared. But Simon did not fear the jungle, and he did not fear the Beast. "'Maybe,' he said hesitantly, 'maybe there is a beast. . . . maybe it's only us'" (89).

The Beast takes many forms in the boys' imaginations; once, they saw a strange shape moving at the top of a mountain, and they were afraid that it was the Beast. No one dared to go near it save Simon, who went alone to the mountaintop during one of his sojourns; he discovered that the Beast was only a dead parachuter whose gear shifted in the wind. Ironically, the dead man was a soldier, a symbol of the savagery that was the true Beast. However, Simon's compassion showed again as he braved the stench to cut the parachute from the corpse; he laid the Beast to rest. With this act of his pensive and generous nature, he proved what a good leader he could have been.

The other boys would never have chosen him as a leader, though. Simon had one terrible weakness, a type of hemophilia that caused nosebleeds. He often passed out from the loss of blood; he was not as energetic as the other boys, and his resulting clumsiness made him appear not only weak but somewhat stupid. "For a moment or two, Simon was happy to be accepted" (104), but these few moments were rare. Between his illness and his preference for solitude, Simon was too different from the other boys. They would take no weaklings or prophets for leaders. The leaders they did choose, Ralph and Jack, boys of twelve years, were the symbolic representations of ignorance and savagery.

Ralph and Jack were in almost constant conflict, so the boys on the island became accustomed to extremes in their leaders. One night, Jack--against Ralph's protests--led the boys in a hunting dance. A barely-visible figure emerged from the jungle, and the mob of wild boys attacked it and killed it. "'It was an accident,' said Piggy suddenly. . . . 'He hadn't no business crawling like that out of the dark'" (157). Simon had come out of the jungle after a dizzy spell, and the boys mistook the prophet for the Beast. Later, the boys realized what they had done, and after they murdered the one boy who represented truth, they lied about it: "'We never done nothing, we never seen nothing'" (158).

Truth did die with Simon. He did not tell them about the true nature of the Beast. Had he lived, he probably would not have told them about the real Beast, either. The reader might blame Simon for the entire tragedy because, in the contemporary idea of justice, those who see a crime and do nothing to stop it are as guilty as those who commit the crime. Simon, being fearful of the other boys, yet wanting their acceptance, did not fight their savagery and ignorance.

However, Simon was not part of the contemporary civilization and cannot be judged by that society's laws. His society was the state of pure human nature, and if his weakness was his fear, his compatriots' savagery justifies that weakness. If his flaw was his desire to be accepted, then he was no different from any of the other boys. Simon was just as human as all the children on the island, abandoned to "the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart" (202). If the truth died with Simon, it died because human nature hates prophets, because humans naturally live in savagery and ignorance.

For A.P. Senior English, October 1994.

Book review by: Nialle Woods


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