Drama Lord of the Flies Style, Point of View & Tone by William Golding
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Lord of the Flies mixes lyric descriptions of nature with vivid action scenes and extended passages of dialogue to create a style that grows increasingly foreboding over the course of the novel, mirroring the boys’ descent into violence and chaos. The book opens with a description of the island in the aftermath of the plane crash that maroons the boys: “all round him the long scar smashed into the jungle was a bath of heat…a bird, a vision of red and yellow, flashed upward with a witch-like cry.” Golding uses metaphor and generic words like “boy,” “bird,” and “jungle” to create a sense of dislocation in the reader–where are we? Who is the boy? What is the scar and what caused it? These stylistic choices align the reader with the boys, who might be asking similar questions at this point in the narrative. The comparisons of a plane crash to a scar, and a bird to a witch, create an ominous sense that despite the beauty of the natural setting, the island is threatening as well, and the boys’ experience on the island will scar them.
At the same time, Golding holds his characters, and his reader, at arm’s length, presenting events in a fairly detached, straightforward style, enhancing the characters’ role as symbols as well as individuals, and preventing the reader from identifying with any one character too closely. When one of the littluns has a nightmare, “the wail rose, remote and unearthly, and turned to an inarticulate gibbering.” By removing the humanity and intelligibility from the boy’s cries, Golding creates a distance from the boy’s suffering. Golding uses more intimate, evocative language to make the island itself a personification of the evil in the boys, as when the trees “rubbed each other with an evil speaking,” or in this passage: “revolving masses of gas piled up the static until the air was ready to explode... Even the air that pushed in from the sea was hot and held no refreshment. Colors drained from water and trees and pink surfaces of rock, and the white and brown clouds brooded. Nothing prospered but the flies…” Here, even an invisible element like the air is filled with menace and danger.
In contrast to his lush descriptions of nature, Golding’s characters speak in terse, vernacular prose, which both grounds the book in its time and place, and reflects the breakdown of communication over the course of the book. In the beginning of the novel, the boys employ a good deal of slang, referring to the island as “wizard” and “wacco,” British slang words from the 1950s for great or cool. Piggy speaks in ungrammatical slang, as when he says, “Nobody don’t know we’re here.” Piggy’s speech identifies him as lower class than the other boys, as does the fact that he has no parents, and was raised by an aunt who owns a sweet shop. His class status further separates him from his peers. Ralph and Jack are more articulate, but Ralph finds himself at a loss for words in times of intense emotion, and resorts to physical displays: “Ralph, faced by the task of translating this into an explanation, stood on his head and fell over.” As the boys lose their civilization, their speech becomes less coherent and organized, and by the end they’ve devolved to a form of pre-speech, ululating, screaming, shouting, moaning, and, finally, crying, having all but lost the ability to communicate.
Golding employs a third-person omniscient narrator in Lord of the Flies, meaning that the narrator speaks in a voice separate from that of any of the characters and sometimes narrates what the characters are thinking and feeling as well as what they’re doing. The narrator only gives us insights into the thoughts of characters sparingly, however. Most often the narrator describes what the characters are doing and how they’re interacting as seen from the outside. The narrator’s point of view is sometimes that of an objective observer of all of the boys, as in the scenes where they’re all meeting and interacting, but sometimes the narrator will follow the point of view of one boy by himself. The characters whose point of view we see most frequently are Ralph, Jack, Simon, and Piggy. The narrator devotes the most time to Ralph, describing not just his thoughts but his thought process—“Then, at the moment of greatest passion and conviction, that curtain flapped in his head and he forgot—what he had been driving at.” The reader also get a sense of Ralph’s home life in an extended reverie where he remembers “when you went to bed there was a bowl of cornflakes with sugar and cream.…Everything was alright; everything was good-humored and friendly.”
The narrator reflects Jack’s internal thought the least out of all the major characters, but still takes the reader inside his head, as after he kills the so “His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come the them when they had closed in on the struggling pig...” We also spend brief amounts of time inside the heads of littluns in order to show that the impulses ruling the main characters are universal and innate. We only see these characters briefly, such as Henry, who becomes “absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things,” or Maurice, who still feels “the unease of wrongdoing” when he throws sand in Percival’s eye. Golding shows that even the youngest boys experience lust for power, or remorse at causing pain. Yet he mostly shows the littluns from a distanced perspective. This technique likens them to a generic mob, capable of acting as a single organism, as when they join Jack’s tribe and unquestioningly participate in the pursuit of Ralph. By switching between brief interior glimpses into specific littluns and presenting them as a single character, the narrator shows the way the individual is susceptible to mob mentality.
The tone of Lord of the Flies is fairly aloof, creating a sense of removal from the events. The boys on the island generally treat each other with a lack of sympathy, and, similarly, the overall tone of the book expresses neither shock nor sympathy toward what happens. Events such as the deaths of Simon and Piggy are related in matter-of-fact detail: “Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across the square red rock in the sea. His head opened, and stuff came out and turned red.” The tone here is resigned, expressing no surprise at the violent death of one of the main characters. The sense is that the deaths are as inevitable as the tide: “Then the sea breathed again in a long, slow sigh, the water boiled white and pink over the rock; and when it went, sucking back again, the body of Piggy was gone.” By focusing on the natural world in the immediate aftermath of the death, instead of the boys, Golding distances the reader from the emotion of the scene, but his precise details about what Piggy’s broken body looks like impart a sense of horror and disgust.
Throughout the novel, Golding’s tone suggests the island itself is as responsible for what happens as the boys. Golding’s tone when describing nature is anxious and distrustful. He personifies nature as a violent, vengeful force. The heat becomes “a blow that (the boys) ducked.” The trees rub together “with an evil speaking.” The tide is a “sleeping leviathan” and the sea boils “with a roar.” Clouds “squeezed, produced moment by moment this close, tormenting heat.” Evening comes, “not with calm beauty but with the threat of violence.” The boys are presented as almost as vulnerable to the forces of nature as to each other, sustaining the tone of justified fear. Nature is a destructive force that elicits the boys’ most savage natures. Their growing discomfort and unease with the effects of nature, as expressed by Ralph’s disgust at his filthy clothes, overgrown hair, and unbrushed teeth, heighten the tone of anxiety.
