My kids are reading Lord of the Flies as their final selection in English I Honors. It’s been years since I last taught it; it’s been even longer since I actually read it.
As I reread it, passages that never stood out as significant take on new importance. For example, Ralph laments the fact that there are no adults who “could get a message to us,” expressing a fear that many of the boys have: “If only they could send us something grown-up.. . . a sign or something.” The next paragraph reads:
A thin wail out of the darkness chilled them and set them grabbing for each other. Then the wail rose, remote and unearthly, and turned to an inarticulate gibbering. Percival Wemys Madison, of the Vicarage, Harcourt St. Anthony, lying in the long grass, was living through circumstances in which the incantation of his address was powerless to help him.
Young Percival is doing exactly what his parents taught him: he’s lost, and he’s simply reciting his address.
“If you’re ever lost,” we can imagine his parents calmly telling him, “find a police officer and tell him your address.”
“The Vicar- vicar,” Percival, who is six, struggles.
“Vicarage,” his father, obviously an Anglican priest, prompts.
“The Vicarage, Hardcourt…”
“No, son. No ‘d.’ Just ‘Harcourt.”
“Harcourt…”
They practice it a while. It becomes a morning chant with breakfast, an afternoon game, an evening blessing.
When he has it, he’s got it for good. He recites it at blistering speed a few days later through smiling lips.
“That’s wonderful!” his mother applauds.
And now, trying to come to grips with the terrors that plague him endlessly, he falls back on his incantation — what a wonderful choice of words — and tries to will himself out of the place. He can’t be convinced that there is no beast lurking on the island, but he has no idea what he should really fear.
The older boys do, though. Jack and Ralph have begun their irrevocable split, with Jack resorting to his first violent act: punching Piggy in the stomach and then knocking his glasses off, simultaneously blinding Piggy and cutting all the boys off from civilization, as it was Piggy’s glasses they used to light the signal fire.
“I know there isn’t no beast—not with claws and all that, I mean—but I know there isn’t no fear, either.”
Piggy paused.
“Unless—”
Ralph moved restlessly.
“Unless what?”
“Unless we get frightened of people.”
I imagine my own six-year-old in this situation, watching the closest things to adults around him — the boys of thirteen and fourteen — descend into fighting and arguing, with chaos unimaginable just days away, and I shudder.
When we reach this part of the book, I’m going to break with tradition and help the kids see all the foreshadowing. “If you’re not terrified imagining yourself in this situation, you’re not really reading this book.”