Lord of the Flies: Chapter 9 Analysis

Chapter 9 - A View to a Death

This chapter focuses on Simon and the fulfillment of his role as a visionary mystic. Awakening from his faint, he asks again out loud the question he put to the assembly in the previous chapter: "What else is there to do?" He must face whatever is on the mountain. That confrontation seems to have aged him: he walks with the difficulty of an old man, as if bowed down by "the infinite cynicism of adult life" that he saw in the pig's eyes.

Simon doesn't seem to fear the beast sighted on the mountain. Given the doubts he had in Chapter 6 about this supposed beast and having had a visitation from the true beast, the Lord of the Flies, Simon has moved past fear into another arena of emotion. Approaching the frightful figure on the mountain, he sees it sit up and look at him; in response "He hid his face" as if in shame over the boys' misconceptions about its menace. Then he frees the lines of the soldier's parachute from the rocks, enabling the dead soldier to fly off during the storm, which it does upon Simon's death.

In a way, the soldier is actually working as an agent of the true beast, bringing out the worst in the boys. They do not band together to overcome this fearful situation but allow their own worst impulses to surface and dominate, fragmenting into opposing groups and killing one of their own in a frenzy of fear and savagery. Considering that his arrival on the island was brought about by a battle of the ongoing war, the soldier truly was an emissary of the beast, the savagery that lurks in humanity.

Of the boys, only Simon took the presence of an unidentified creature on the mountain as a sign to be explored or a symbol to be considered, rather than as an indication of an animal-beast's presence. By courageously seeking out the figure on the mountain, Simon fulfills his destiny of revelation. Having confronted both the Lord of the Flies (the sow's head on a stick) and the so-called beast (the soldier's corpse), Simon understands the nature of the evil on the island. He doesn't get to share his revelation with the other boys because they are not ready to accept or understand it. They are living out the true beast's actions while they think of themselves as playacting the roles of painted savages, which is Jack's idea of fun — and the true beast's as well.

When the tide carries off Simon's body, covered in the jellyfish-like phosphorescent creatures that come in with the tide, Golding shifts the focus from Simon's body's movements to the much larger progressions of the sun, moon, and earth because Simon represents a knowledge as fundamental as the elements.

Golding uses the weather to symbolize a kind of universal assessment of the actions that have taken place in the novel and as a way to…