Civilization and Savagery

The ending of William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” left me feeling unfulfilled and disappointed. So much had happened up to that point; with Simon and Piggy being murdered and Ralph being hunted down, well, I expected more. To me (and many others) Simon, Piggy, and Ralph were the sanest boys on that island. Since we were already two for three, I was pretty sure that Ralph was going to get murdered. But instead, it was like the author gave up and said: “it was all just a dream…” Most people I talked to seemed to feel the same way, and we all talked about it angrily.

But, personally, I didn't find ranting about it to be very effective. I thought that there had to be more to the story. There had to be. So I flipped to the back of the book and boom! There it was. “Afterword by Lois Lowry”. Okay, I thought. Lois Lowry. She’s smart, she’ll explain to me why it ended that way. So I read what she had written.

She talked about how she felt about each of the characters,  but in the end, she focused on the one that she hated. Surprisingly enough, it wasn’t Jack. Jack, savagery in the form of a human, was not the “big bad” in her mind. Instead, she said this:

“I am left with only one character whom I loathe, and will always. He appears only briefly — I leave you to find him on your own — and he above all the others makes me question what civilization actually means: a spotless uniform, a dignified posture and a set of elaborate rules? How dare he?”

McCallum, I’m very sorry for using such a long quote, but it had to be said. It took me a while, actually, to figure out who she was talking about. Maybe it was too obvious, I couldn’t see it because it was right in front of me. The same concept, the same person, that many (including myself) were upset with was the same person that Lois Lowry “loathes”.

The naval officer that finds the boys on the island is disapproving of how the boys had ended up acting. He says that as British boys they should know better. Better than what?

The actions of the boys on the island were insane! They killed three and would’ve killed more if they hadn't been “saved”. They were absolute savages.

When I talked to other people about the book, I noticed that Simon was definitely a “fan favorite”. Everyone seemed to like him the best. When I asked why the answer was always because he was sane. Simon discovered the beast (both of them, really) and Simon was the voice of reason.

I laughed at this. Why was Simon the one who was considered “sane”? I pointed out that Ralph and Piggy were reasonable, and I especially pointed out that Simon was insane! He spent some of his last minutes having a nice conversation with a pig’s head. On a stick.

“Yeah, but…” was the answer to that. As if that meant that Simon wasn’t insane. Because, mentally, Simon was insane. But morally, he was more right than anyone else.

Simon knew that we are the beast. We are the beast. There's no way around it. As humans, we are just too selfish to be anything but the beast. We try to hide it, try to contain it, but containing isn’t the same as changing. The navy officer can sit and look disapprovingly at those boys as much as he wants, but in the end, he is just as much of a savage as they had become.

I think that we are all afraid of being “savages”, and this is why we created our “justice” system. Because if we can label good and bad, savage and civil, then we can appease our consciences.

If we can name, imprison, and punish the people who are “bad”, then we can easily know when we are “good.”

I listened to a podcast with my mom, and it talked about a boy’s journey through our justice system. Hearing about Joshua’s story through juvie, county jail, and the state penitentiary, I felt bad for him more than anything else. More than once he was just forgotten by the state, or his attempts to find justice were denied.

This highlights all of the flaws in our “civilization”. We do things to put away the people that we consider savage, but we tend to do it in a savage way. I think that the problem comes when we forget that we are all on the brink of destruction. Every single one of us is a step away from insanity, savagery, and in the end, there’s nothing we can do to change that.