Key Quote
“"Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!"”
The Lord of the Flies (pig's head) · Chapter 8
Focus: “Fancy”
The Lord of the Flies — the severed pig's head on a stake — 'speaks' to Simon in a hallucinatory conversation, mocking the boys' belief that evil can be physically hunted. Evil, the head says, is inside them.
Technique 1 — SARDONIC TONE / MOCKING IMPERIOUS VOICE
The word 'Fancy' — meaning 'Imagine!' or 'How absurd to think!' — is sardonic (darkly mocking). The Lord of the Flies speaks with condescending amusement, as if the idea of hunting the beast is laughably naive. This mocking tone is terrifying because it comes from a DEAD PIG'S HEAD — the most degraded, disgusting object on the island is wiser than the boys. The inversion is complete: the rotting head of a killed pig understands truth better than the living children.
The exclamation mark heightens the mockery — the Lord of the Flies is LAUGHING at the boys' delusion. The suggestion that the beast can be 'hunted and killed' is treated as a joke because it misidentifies evil as external and physical. The Lord of the Flies — whose name translates from Hebrew as Beelzebub (a name for the devil) — knows that evil cannot be hunted because evil is the hunter.
Key Words
RAD — STAGNATE
The Lord of the Flies reveals that the boys are stagnating — their attempt to 'hunt' the beast is futile because the real beast (their own evil) cannot be killed. They will keep hunting, keep failing, keep circling the same problem without solving it. The boys' activity (hunting) disguises their stagnation: they APPEAR to be doing something useful but are chasing a phantom while the real threat grows inside them.
Key Words
Technique 2 — PERSONIFICATION — THE SPEAKING HEAD
The pig's head is personified — given a voice, intelligence, and personality. But this personification is ambiguous: does the head actually speak, or is Simon hallucinating? Golding deliberately leaves this unclear, creating a liminal (in-between) moment where the boundary between reality and vision dissolves. The head's 'speech' may be Simon's subconscious articulating what his conscious mind already knows — the beast is internal.
As a memento mori (reminder of death), the pig's head on the stake is a gruesome variant of the skull in Renaissance painting — a symbol reminding the viewer of mortality and decay. The head reminds the boys (and the reader) that their violence, taken to its conclusion, produces nothing but rot. The speaking head is death speaking to the living, warning them that they are already corrupted.
Key Words
Context (AO3)
BEELZEBUB
The novel's title — Lord of the Flies — is a translation of the Hebrew 'Ba'al Zevuv' (Beelzebub), a Philistine deity later identified with Satan. Golding's title thus identifies the pig's head with the devil — but a devil that exists within the boys, not as an external supernatural being.
SIMON AS CHRIST FIGURE
Simon's conversation with the Lord of the Flies parallels Christ's temptation in the wilderness — a spiritual figure confronting evil in isolation. Like Christ, Simon gains truth from the encounter; unlike Christ, Simon is killed before he can share it. Simon is the sacrificed truth-teller.
Key Words
WOW — THE ID (Freud)
Freud's model of the psyche — id (primitive drives), ego (rational self), and superego (moral conscience) — maps directly onto Golding's characters. Jack represents the id: instinct, violence, and the desire for immediate gratification. Ralph represents the ego: attempting to mediate between instinct and morality. Piggy represents the superego: rules, reason, and moral judgement. Simon represents something beyond Freud's model — a spiritual insight that transcends the psychic structure entirely. The Lord of the Flies, speaking to Simon, IS the id given a voice: it articulates the primitive drives that civilisation suppresses. Its message — 'I'm part of you' — is Freud's central insight: the id cannot be expelled because it is a fundamental component of the psyche. The boys' attempt to hunt the beast externally is the psychological equivalent of repression — trying to deny the id's existence. Freud showed that repression always fails: the repressed returns, often in more dangerous forms. The island proves Freud right.
Key Words