Lord Of The Flies: Descriptions of Important Characters

Ralph

He is the first boy that the reader meets in the story. At the beginning of the book, he meets Piggy, another boy who is on the island, and they find a conch shell which he uses to call the other boys to the meeting. At the meeting all the boys vote for a leader, and he wins making him the leader of all the boys of the island. He insists on keeping a fire going so that a ship will see the smoke and come to save them, which gets pushback from Jack, who wants to focus on hunting. Later in the book everyone else on the island who is alive sides with Jack and they try to kill him. One important characteristic about him is that he deeply cares about getting saved and returning to civilization, which is the reason he cares so much about keeping the smoke signal going. This shows his perseverance throughout the story. He also wants the boys on the island to stay civilized, which does not happen, and he ends up being by far the most civilized boy on the island in the last chapter after all the other boys turned to savagery.

Piggy

He is the first person that Ralph meets on the island. He is a fat boy with glasses, and his size is the cause of his nickname. He tells this name to Ralph, but says he would rather be called anything else than this name and asks Ralph to never tell it to the other boys. Going against what he had said, Ralph shares the mean nickname with the other boys at the first meeting, and this is what he is called throughout the book. He is often rejected by other boys in the novel due to his differences, including his greater weight, his asthma, and his need to wear glasses. Even though he is often not treated that well by Ralph, he still remains friends with him, and he is one of the few boys who stay with Ralph when many of the other boys join Jack’s tribe. His glasses were also very important to the boys on the island because they were used to create fire. Towards the end of the book, Jack came in the night to steal his glasses. When he went with Ralph to confront Jack about this, he ended up getting killed by Jack in the dispute. He was the most sensible and civil one out of all the boys on the island, and his death represents how all the sensibility and civilization had gone from the island.

Jack

The reader first meets this character when he shows up to the meeting with a group of boys. When Ralph brings up the idea of electing a chief, he is the only one that challenges him for this position, but ends up losing to Ralph, since only the choir of boys he came with voted for him while everyone else voted for Ralph. At first, he and Ralph get along well. They explore the island together, and Ralph also lets him be in charge of a group of hunters. Even though the relationship between him and Ralph starts off okay, tensions soon build between the two. The tensions between the two boys start to build when he lets the fire out to go hunt a pig. This makes Ralph angry because the fire was supposed to create a smoke signal for ships to see, and Ralph had seen a ship pass by while the fire had gone out. In contrast, he does not care about the fire as much as he cares about hunting. This shows that he prefers options that can provide the quickest feeling of success for himself rather than thinking about achieving long-term goals that would benefit the whole group. The division between him and Ralph causes him to break off from Ralph’s tribe and create his own tribe. He uses food that he hunted to successfully convince boys from Ralph’s tribe to come join him. His character is used to represent the evil and self-interest inside of the boys on the island.

Simon

This character first becomes significant when he is picked to explore the island with Ralph and Jack towards the beginning of the book, though the biggest significance this character has in the story is during the second part of the book when he tries to bring a pig’s head to the beast as an offering. While he is alone in the forest with the pig’s head, he starts hallucinating and believes that the pig’s head is speaking to him. The pig’s head is known in the book as the Lord of the Flies, and it represents evil. The Lord of the Flies tells him that he cannot run from the Beast or kill the Beast because the Beast lives inside him and inside the other boys. He learns that the Beast is not something that lives in the forest, but it is the evil living inside the boys. Ironically, when he tries to go back to the other boys they kill him. This shows how the boys on the island are losing their morals and letting the beast inside of them come out.