The Short Version
This is a chapter by chapter guide to William Golding’s novel, with full spoilers from the first page to the last, so finish the book first if you want it to surprise you. A group of British schoolboys ends up on a tropical island with no grownups. They elect Ralph as chief, use a conch shell to run their meetings and try to keep a signal fire going, but Jack and his hunters care more about killing pigs. Fear of a beast splits the group in two, two boys are killed, and the island is on fire when help finally arrives.
Chapter 1: The Sound of the Shell
A fair haired boy named Ralph, twelve years and a few months old, picks his way out of the jungle toward a lagoon. A fat boy with thick glasses and asthma follows him. The plane that carried them has gone, and there seem to be no grownups at all. The fat boy asks Ralph not to tell anyone his old school nickname, Piggy. Ralph laughs at it.
Near a platform of pink granite, they spot a cream colored shell in the water. Piggy knows it is a conch. Ralph learns to blow it, and the noise brings children from all over the beach, including little Johnny and the twins, Sam and Eric. Then a choir in black cloaks marches up, led by a tall, red haired boy, Jack Merridew. Jack calls Piggy Fatty and tells him to shut up, so Ralph blurts out the real nickname. Everyone laughs.
Roger suggests a vote for chief. Only the choir votes for Jack, so Ralph wins. To make peace, Ralph gives Jack the choir, and Jack says they will be hunters. Ralph, Jack and Simon climb the mountain and see that they are on an island. On the way back, they find a piglet caught in creepers. Jack raises his knife but cannot bring it down, and the piglet escapes.
This chapter sets up the conch as the sign of order, and shows a Jack who still cannot kill.
Chapter 2: Fire on the Mountain
At a second meeting, Ralph reports that the island has no people on it. He makes a rule: whoever holds the conch gets to speak. Jack is excited about rules, and about what will happen to anyone who breaks them. Piggy warns that nobody knows where they are, since the plane never reached its destination.
A small boy with a mulberry colored birthmark says he saw a beastie, a snake thing, in the woods at night. Ralph insists there is no beast. Jack says that if there were, his hunters would kill it. Ralph then cheers everyone up. His father is in the Navy, he says, and a ship will come. To help it find them, they need smoke on the mountain.
Everyone charges up after Jack, leaving Ralph and Piggy behind. They pile up wood, but nobody has matches. Jack grabs Piggy’s glasses, and Ralph uses the lenses to focus sunlight and start the fire. On the mountain, Jack says the conch doesn’t count up there. He also says they need rules because “the English are best at everything.” He offers his choir to keep the fire going. Then the fire spreads into the forest below. Piggy asks where the boy with the birthmark is. Nobody can see him.
Here Piggy’s glasses first become the only way to make fire, and the island has its first missing child.
Chapter 3: Huts on the Beach
Jack hunts alone in the forest with a sharpened stick, tracking pigs by their droppings. He throws his spear and misses. Back at the beach, Ralph and Simon are struggling with the shelters. Two stand shakily and a third has fallen apart. Everyone else has run off to swim, eat or play.
Ralph and Jack argue. Ralph wants shelters, and Jack wants meat. Ralph says the littluns scream in their sleep, and Simon adds that it is as if the beastie were real. Jack admits that when he hunts alone, he sometimes feels he is being hunted. They look up at the thin smoke on the mountain, and Ralph worries that it isn’t enough. Jack is already planning to paint his face so the pigs won’t see him. The two boys walk side by side, unable to understand each other.
Simon slips away. He picks fruit for the littluns who follow him, then goes deep into the forest to a sunny clearing. There, he crawls into a hidden space inside a mat of creepers and sits alone as night falls.
The split between Ralph’s world of rescue and Jack’s world of hunting starts here, and Simon’s secret clearing will matter again later.
Chapter 4: Painted Faces and Long Hair
Life on the island falls into a rhythm of hot days and frightening nights. The smallest boys, the littluns, play and eat fruit and have nightmares. On the beach, Roger and Maurice kick over the littluns’ sandcastles. Roger then throws stones near a littlun called Henry, but he aims to miss, still held back by the rules of the life he left behind.
Jack paints his face with white and red clay and a stripe of charcoal. Behind this mask, he feels free of shame. He takes the hunters out, including Sam and Eric, who were supposed to be watching the fire.
Down at the bathing pool, Ralph spots a ship’s smoke on the horizon. The boys race up the mountain, but the signal fire is dead and the ship moves away. Then Jack’s hunters come up the mountain, chanting and carrying their first pig. Ralph tells Jack he let the fire go out. When Piggy joins in, Jack punches him in the stomach and hits his head. Piggy’s glasses fly off, and one lens breaks.
Jack apologizes for the fire, but Ralph won’t accept it. They relight the fire with Piggy’s glasses and roast the meat. Jack refuses Piggy any meat, so Simon gives Piggy his own. The hunters dance, with Maurice pretending to be the pig. Ralph calls an assembly.
The face paint and the broken lens mark the moment Jack’s way of life starts to win.
Chapter 5: Beast from Water
Ralph walks along the beach and realizes how hard it is to lead. He knows he can’t think the way Piggy can. He calls a serious meeting at sunset. He lists what has gone wrong: the water shells are empty, only he and Simon built the last shelter, and the boys are using any spot as a toilet. Most important, the fire must never go out, and no fire is allowed anywhere but the mountain.
Then he raises the fear. Jack says there is no beast and calls the littluns cry babies. Piggy says life is scientific, unless they become frightened of people. A littlun named Phil says he saw something big moving in the trees, and Simon admits he was out walking that night. A tiny boy, Percival, cries until he falls asleep, then mutters that the beast comes out of the sea.
Simon tries to explain that “maybe it’s only us,” but the assembly laughs him down. Ralph holds a vote on whether there may be ghosts, and hands go up. Jack shouts down Piggy and the rules, and leads the hunters away in a wild dance on the beach. Ralph wants to give up being chief, but Piggy and Simon beg him to stay. Ralph wishes the grownups could send them a sign.
This is the chapter where the conch loses its hold, and Simon first says the beast might be inside them.
Chapter 6: Beast from Air
That night, while the boys sleep, there is a battle high in the sky. A dead man falls by parachute and lands on the mountaintop. His lines catch on the rocks, so whenever the wind blows, the body sits up and then bows forward again.
Sam and Eric, on fire duty, see the shape in the firelight and run. At an early morning assembly they describe a furry beast with wings, eyes, teeth and claws. Jack wants a hunt and says they don’t need the conch anymore. Ralph insists the fire matters most. The one place Jack hasn’t explored is the rocky tail of the island, a fort shaped rock the boys call the castle, so the bigger boys set out with spears. Piggy stays behind with the littluns.
On the way, Simon pictures the beast as a human, heroic and sick at once. At the castle, Ralph goes first along a narrow ledge, as chief. Jack follows. There is no beast, only rock, rotten eggs and a trickle of fresh water. Jack thinks it would make a great fort. The others start rolling rocks into the sea, and Ralph angrily orders them back toward the mountain to check for the beast and relight the fire.
The beast now has a real body, but it is a dead man from the grownups’ war.
Chapter 7: Shadows and Tall Trees
On the way to the mountain, Ralph notices how filthy everyone is, himself included, and that he has started biting his nails. Looking out at the open ocean on the far side of the island, he feels hopeless. Simon tells him quietly that he will get back home.
A boar charges along the pig run. Ralph throws his spear and hits it on the snout, and he feels proud. Then the hunters play at hunting, with Robert as the pig. The game turns rough. Ralph joins in, jabbing with a spear, and Robert ends up hurt and frightened. Jack jokes that next time they should use a littlun.
Ralph worries about Piggy and the littluns left alone, so Simon volunteers to walk through the forest by himself to tell them the group will be late. Ralph asks Jack why he hates him. Jack dares Ralph to climb the mountain in the dark, and Ralph, Jack and Roger go up. Jack goes ahead and comes back shaking. Together the three creep forward and see something like a great ape sitting with its head between its knees. The wind lifts its head toward them, showing what is left of a face, and they run.
Ralph’s moment in the fake hunt shows that the violence is in him too, and the three boys now believe the beast is real.
Chapter 8: Gift for the Darkness
At dawn, Ralph says they can’t fight the beast and calls Jack’s hunters boys armed with sticks. Jack blows the conch and calls a meeting. He says Ralph is a coward and not a proper chief, and asks who wants Ralph gone. Nobody raises a hand. In tears, Jack says he won’t play anymore and walks off, inviting anyone who wants to hunt to follow.
Simon suggests climbing the mountain, but nobody listens. Piggy suggests moving the signal fire down to the beach, and for the first time he lights it himself. Later, Ralph sees that many of the older boys have slipped away to join Jack.
Jack tells his group he is chief now and that they will forget the beast. They hunt a sow and kill her in a sunny clearing, the same one where Simon is hiding. Jack puts her head on a stick sharpened at both ends as a gift for the beast. Then Jack and two painted hunters raid Ralph’s camp for burning branches and invite everyone to a feast. Ralph tries to explain why the fire matters and loses his train of thought.
Alone, Simon stares at the head, now covered in flies. In his mind, the Lord of the Flies speaks to him. It says, “And I’m the Beast,” mocks the idea of hunting it, and warns him off. Simon faints.
This is the chapter that gives the book its title, and it names the beast as something inside the boys.
Chapter 9: A View to a Death
A storm builds over the island. Simon wakes up from his fit and climbs the mountain. There he finds the beast: the rotting body of the parachutist, held up by tangled lines. He is sick, then frees the lines from the rocks. Seeing smoke far along the beach, he heads down to tell the others that the beast is harmless.
Meanwhile, Ralph and Piggy go to Jack’s feast, saying they want to make sure nothing bad happens. Jack sits painted on a log like an idol. He gives them meat, then asks who will join his tribe. Ralph says he has the conch. Jack says the conch doesn’t count at this end of the island. When the rain starts, Jack starts a dance. Roger plays the pig, and everyone chants about killing the beast. Ralph and Piggy join the edge of the circle.
In the lightning, a figure crawls out of the forest, crying about a dead man on a hill. It is Simon. The boys fall on him with sticks, teeth and hands and kill him. Later the wind carries the parachutist’s body off the mountain and out to sea. During the night, the tide takes Simon’s body away too.
Simon dies just as he brings the one piece of news that could have ended the fear.
Chapter 10: The Shell and the Glasses
Afterward, Ralph, Piggy and the twins are the only older boys left in the old camp. Ralph says Simon’s death was murder. Piggy insists it was an accident and that the two of them were only on the outside of the circle. When Sam and Eric come back, all four pretend they left the feast early.
At Castle Rock, Jack’s tribe has set a log under a big rock as a lever, ready to drop it on anyone crossing the narrow neck of land. Roger hears that Jack had a boy named Wilfred tied up and beaten, without saying why. Jack tells the tribe that the beast came to them in disguise, and that they should keep leaving it the heads of their kills. Since they have no way to light a fire, Jack plans to take one from Ralph’s camp.
Ralph’s small group can barely keep their fire alive. That night, attackers come into their shelter. In the dark, the boys fight blindly and the shelter collapses. Ralph and Piggy guess the raiders wanted the conch, but it is still on the platform. Jack is trotting back to Castle Rock with Piggy’s broken glasses in his hand.
Without the glasses, Ralph’s side can no longer make fire, and Jack now controls it.
Chapter 11: Castle Rock
At dawn, the fire is dead and Piggy can barely see. Ralph, Piggy and the twins hold an assembly of four. Piggy decides to carry the conch to Jack and ask for his glasses back, not as a favor but because it’s right. Ralph refuses to let them wear paint, since they aren’t savages, and he struggles again to remember why smoke matters.
At Castle Rock, painted boys guard the narrow neck of land. Ralph blows the conch, and Jack comes back from hunting. Ralph calls him a thief, and the two boys fight with spears. Jack orders his tribe to tie up Sam and Eric, and they do.
Piggy holds up the conch and asks the tribe whether it is better to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill. High above, Roger has been dropping stones near them. Now he leans his whole weight on the lever. A huge rock crashes down onto the neck. It hits Piggy and smashes the conch into a thousand pieces. Piggy falls forty feet onto a rock in the sea, and the next wave takes his body.
Jack screams that he is chief and throws his spear at Ralph, wounding him in the side. Ralph runs into the forest. Back at the rock, Jack prods the bound twins with a spear, and Roger moves toward them.
The conch and Piggy are destroyed together, and nothing is left to stop Jack and Roger.
Chapter 12: Cry of the Hunters
Ralph hides near Castle Rock, hurt and alone. Two littluns scream and run when they see him. In the clearing, he finds the pig’s skull on its stick. He smashes it and takes the stick as a spear.
That night, he climbs up to Sam and Eric, who are now guarding the rock for Jack. They tell him the whole tribe will hunt him tomorrow in a line across the island. When Ralph asks what they will do to him, they only answer, “Roger sharpened a stick at both ends.” Sam gives him some meat, and Ralph tells them he will hide in the thicket close by.
In the morning, the hunters learn his hiding place by hurting one of the twins. They roll huge rocks onto the thicket, then set it on fire. Ralph wounds two hunters and runs, and soon the whole island is burning. When a hunter finds his last hiding place, Ralph bursts out screaming and flees to the beach.
He falls at the feet of a naval officer, whose ship saw the smoke. Ralph tells him two boys are dead. The officer expected British boys to do better, and Ralph begins to cry for the end of innocence and for Piggy, while the officer looks out at his ship.
The fire meant to kill Ralph is the smoke that finally brings rescue.
The Chapters At A Glance
| Chapter | Title | Key event |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Sound of the Shell | Ralph blows the conch and is elected chief |
| 2 | Fire on the Mountain | Piggy’s glasses light the first fire, and a littlun goes missing |
| 3 | Huts on the Beach | Ralph and Jack clash over shelters and hunting |
| 4 | Painted Faces and Long Hair | The fire goes out as a ship passes, and Jack’s hunters kill a pig |
| 5 | Beast from Water | A disorderly assembly argues about the beast and ghosts |
| 6 | Beast from Air | A dead parachutist lands on the mountain and is mistaken for the beast |
| 7 | Shadows and Tall Trees | A mock hunt turns rough, and three boys see the shape on the mountain |
| 8 | Gift for the Darkness | Jack forms his own tribe, and Simon faces the pig’s head |
| 9 | A View to a Death | Simon learns the truth and is killed in the storm dance |
| 10 | The Shell and the Glasses | Jack’s raiders steal Piggy’s glasses |
| 11 | Castle Rock | Roger’s rock kills Piggy and smashes the conch |
| 12 | Cry of the Hunters | The tribe hunts Ralph until a naval officer arrives |
Where To Go Next
For a closer look at the final chapters and the officer’s rescue, read our Lord of the Flies ending explained. If you’re studying the book or leading a discussion, our book club guide covers the symbols, the themes and discussion questions. And if you’re still deciding whether to read it, start with our Lord of the Flies review.
