Lord of the Flies
I’m teaching this to a year nine class so for my own preparation, I had a go at a GCSE exam question on Simon.
Question:
Do you think Simon is an important character in Lord of the Flies?
Write about:
how Golding presents the character of Simon
how Golding uses Simon to present ideas about people and society.
Simon is presented as a counterpoint to evil in Lord of the Flies. Whilst initially we see him as physically weak and lacking resolution, eventually we come to see Simon as a Christ-like figure who has a gift for prophesy and whose message goes tragically unheard by the other boys. We could understand him, in a broader sense, as representing a warning to mankind to pay closer attention to Christian teaching.
When we first meet Simon, he has ‘flopped on his face in the sand,’ apparently in a faint. His fellow choristers are unsurprised by this and the other boys pay him little attention. This inauspicious first appearance doesn't suggest that Simon is going to be the hero of this novel. So, the reader is a little surprised when Jack selects Simon to accompany him and Ralph on their initial expedition up the mountain; Jack clearly sees something in him that we are unaware of. Golding's description of Simon as ‘little’ compared to Ralph and Jack reinforces this idea of physical weakness, but the description of his ‘eyes so bright’ and his suggestion of how they could make maps using bark and ‘black stuff’ hint at an intelligence beyond the norm. In the first chapter, Golding also begins to associate Simon with more esoteric ideas - it is Simon who notices the ‘dark… aromatic… candle buds’ on the trees that seem strongly reminiscent of a church-like atmosphere.
As we get to know Simon better, we cannot fail to like him more. Unlike Ralph, Jack and even poor Piggy, he goes about the island quietly doing good and working in the interests of all the boys, but particularly the younger ones. He helps the ‘littleuns’ to reach the ripest fruit, feeding them as Christ fed the 5,000, filling their ‘endless outstretched hands’ (in stark contrast to Roger, who throws stones at them) and he works tirelessly with Ralph to build shelters for the boys to sleep in. This Christian-prophet association with Simon is strengthened when he is closely associated with the untouched, Garden of Eden-like properties of the forest. He walks among the trees where ‘flower and fruit grew together’ and the ‘scent of ripeness’ is everywhere. This impression is further reinforced when the ‘candle buds stirred’ at twilight, opening themselves to reveal fragrant, pure-white flowers.
Golding begins to hint that Simon is possessed of second sight, or some ability to see the future, as when he sees the hunters returning with their first kill ‘what he saw seemed to make him afraid,’ foreshadowing the eventual disintegration of what little order and civilisation the boys have established.
The possibility of Simon's prophet-like qualities is seen again when the boys discuss the ‘beast’ in chapter five. He seems to understand that the fears that the boys experience actually stem from within themselves and he hints that it is these fears themselves that are dangerous. Simon says, ‘maybe [the beast] is only us’ but his youth and his nervousness at speaking with the couch render him unable to explain further and Golding tells the reader that Simon became ‘inarticulate in his effort to explain mankind's essential illness.’ We have already seen the Garden of Eden in Simon's company and now we are reminded of the fall of man and the original sin that lead to mankind's expulsion from the Garden. In reality, from the moment the boys crash-landed on the island, its innocence and purity were destroyed. It is ‘mankind's essential illness’ that has corrupted the island - no matter how ‘good’ an island Ralph and Simon insist on its being. In Golding’s vision, from the moment humans arrived, it was infected with sin.
Perhaps it is Simon's ‘essential illness’ - his epilepsy - that sets him apart from the other boys and allows him to see the island and their predicament from such a different perspective. However, it is this illness that allows Golding the device of Simon's hallucination and the terrifying conversation with the pig's head-lord of the flies-devil character. This extraordinary episode allows the ‘darkness’ that Simon has already seen in the other boys, to become embodied and to speak back the boys' words to poor, sick, suffering Simon. We could almost see this episode as equating to the devil tempting Jesus in the desert, reinforcing the idea that Simon is a Christ-like figure who balances both Jack, as an anarchist-fascist archetype and Piggy as an obsessive rule-maker and follower.
The strongest sense we get of Simon as Christ is when he finally attempts to deliver the good ‘news’ that the beast is in fact ‘harmless,’ even if ‘horrible’ and this results in his crawling body being taken as the ‘beast’ by all of the other boys, even Ralph and Piggy. As a group they are overtaken by emotion and fear, possessed perhaps by the spirit of the Lord of the Flies, grinning away in the forest, as they beat Simon to death. Finally, Simon's soul ascends to heaven in the newly-freed parachute of the dead airman and his body is escorted out to sea with a glowing halo. Simon only achieves perfect peace through death.
In many ways, Simon is quietly the most important character in the novel. Ralph and Piggy exist to represent civil society, democracy and the rule of law - and all of the human flaws that corrupt those concepts. Jack exists to represent anarchy, violence and fascism and the very real dangers that those concepts represented, particularly for Golding in the immediate aftermath of the second world war. However, Simon represents a call for pure human goodness and a return to the values of Jesus Christ - charity, love and goodness - as represented by Simon. However, what is so tragic about this novel, is that Golding seems to believe that Christ-like goodness is incompatible with humanity and that mankind will only destroy those values when it encounters them. A dark place indeed.
