Chapter 10: The Shell and the Glasses

As the tenth chapter of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies begins, it is the morning after Simon’s death during the savage dance. Simon had been mistaken for the beast and, in a frenzied excitement, many of the children on the island participate in stabbing him to death. Both Simon and the other physical manifestation of the beast (the dead pilot) are washed away from the island during a terrible storm, leaving no trace of the beast and opening the island up to complete anarchy at the hands of Jack and his tribe. The first lines of The Shell and the Glasses find Piggy reuniting with Ralph the morning after the death of Simon. Both are visibly battered; Piggy’s glasses have one lens shattered and it is hard for him to see anything clearly, and Ralph seems to be even worse off: “One eye was a slit in his puffy cheek and a great scab had formed on his right knee” (155). The first thing that Ralph asks Piggy is whether they are the only two people on the island not part of Jack’s tribe. It is obvious by his question that Ralph no longer maintains any pretense of authority on the island, and Jack is completely in control. The depressing idea here is that chaos and tyranny have triumphed over democracy and civilization. Golding is stating that he believes that, when a conflict arises between good and evil (in simplest terms), evil will emerge victorious. Only Samneric and a few littluns remain with Ralph. Ralph quietly brings up the subject of Simon, and the two of them sit in gloomy silence for a while. Ralph asks Piggy what to do and Piggy suggests calling an assembly. Ralph’s response to this is a bitter laugh- the idea that he can still control the rest of the kids is ludicrous to him. When Ralph says that Simon was murdered, Piggy is angry: “‘You stop it!’ said Piggy, shrilly” (156). Piggy refuses to accept that he had a hand in Simon’s death and says that the death was just a misunderstanding. He blames anything that he can think of for what happened. “It was dark. There was that -- that bloody dance. There was lightning and thunder and rain. We was scared!” This describes how the boys have gone beyond the point of fun and games. They are no longer boys playing on the island but a bunch of savages. Piggy is the most intelligent person on the island, but he is also the one who is least willing (next to the deceased Simon) to accept the “Lord of the Flies” (symbolic of the devil within each and every man) as a part of himself. Ralph is shocked by the death but unwilling to say that the death was just an accident. He knows that it was murder, though the heightened environment of the island makes it hard to attribute the death to one cause. Piggy is desperate to pin Ralph back up as a poster boy for order, so he convinces Ralph to not reveal to Samneric the true scale of their involvement. Samneric seem to have reached a similar agreement and both pairs say that they left before the dance. However, everyone knows that they were all participants in the death: “The air was heavy with unspoken knowledge… Memory of the dance that none of them had attended shook all four boys convulsively” (158). Golding wants readers to worry about the remainder of Ralph and his group, because they cannot even admit that the darkness (‘the beast’) exists within them, let alone fight against it and defeat it. With this failed deception, the scene switches to the sadistic Roger (who seems less upset about the events of the previous evening) reaching Jack’s new lair on Castle Rock. Jack has now completely become a tyrant, defending his territory with potentially deadly traps and ruling through fear. He has recently tied up and beaten a young boy named Wilfred for seemingly no reason. Roger is fascinated by this and considers what other abuses of authority might be in store for the group. Jack has chalked the events of the night before up to a successful fight against the beast. Jack is careful to point out that the beast is still alive, so he can continue to use fear of the beast as a tool with which he can manipulate the children into following his orders. Jack is flustered when someone asks him a practical question about lighting a fire but quickly recovers himself and schemes to steal fire from Ralph’s group during the night. This thievery shows just how far into darkness Jack and his followers have fallen. They do not even consider asking for fire. Stealing is the only option. The irony of the group’s fear of the beast is that they murdered the only person who could have successfully explained the intangibility of the beast to them in a dance to ward off the beast. Also, the beast has already infiltrated their camp and no number of dances can repel it. They are being led towards utter savagery by the beast that has corrupted Jack. The scene switches to Ralph’s group making a fire with Piggy’s specs. They admit that the fire is as much as for the group’s overall benefit as for their own personal comfort. As they wearily tend to the fire, they realize just how terrified they are of the other group. Samneric remark that it would be better to be captured by enemies of England than by Jack. They are all depressed and losing faith in the signal fire. Even Ralph has been on the island so long that he has nearly forgotten the purpose of the signal fire. It has become a mechanical duty instead of something he personally feels is vital. Piggy, the one least accepting of man’s savage nature, reminds them of rescue and life outside the prison of the island. As night falls, Ralph feels as if he is losing a battle that he must not lose. He is beginning to understand just how pointless his quest to maintain order is. They fall asleep but no one sleeps soundly and all of them have bad dreams. In the middle of the night, Piggy shakes Ralph awake because Jack and two of his tribe are outside are howling for Piggy. Ralph tries to stop Piggy from responding, but his asthma attack forces him out into the open where he is jumped. Jack and his group savagely beat Ralph, Piggy and Samneric. Jack, who has convinced his followers that they are right to kill those who are not part of Jack’s group, has brought about this descent into complete mayhem. In the madness, Ralph is attacked and hysterically punches a nameless savage. He lets go of civilization for a moment and nearly kills the kid. This is a shocking reminder of how close everyone is to becoming as evil as Jack. As Jack’s savages depart, they wonder why they were attacked. From things that Ralph and Eric say, it is evident that they were actually fighting each other while the savages were attacking Piggy. Sam was “mixed up with [himself] in a corner” (167). In darkness, nothing is certain, nothing is clear. This is the lesson that the group learns: darkness clouds logic and reduces man to his most basic primal instincts out of fear of what lurks in the unknown. They realize that the conch was left untouched: the reason why the shell is part of the title is because it is one symbol of society that has been cast aside. The power of the shell is severely diminished. The glasses, the other symbol of society, have been taken by Jack to make fire. At this point in the book, there is no going back and no hope for rescue. The group is left in darkness, irrevocably stranded on an island, doomed to the savage instinct. It seems evident that nothing can happen now that can save the group from themselves. Lord of the Flies is very similar to The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger because in both books, the protagonist is experiencing the end of innocence and is confronted with the evil and corruption of the outside world. Ralph misses his old life at home in civilization and is fighting a losing battle against Jack and evil. Holden Caulfield misses the innocence of childhood and doesn’t want his younger sister to grow up, while he is trying not to “become a prostitute” (sell out) to society like his older brother did in his eyes. In modern media, there also examples of the blurred line between good and evil. In The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent is a good man determined to eliminate crime from Gotham City (“The night is always darkest right before the dawn”). He is corrupted by the evil on the street and becomes just as evil and twisted as what he was fighting against originally. This is just like what Golding is saying will happen to Ralph if he stays on the island with Jack and the savages too long. The Shell and the Glasses overall symbolizes man’s fall into darkness and, during the chapter, the characters pass the point of no return. There is nowhere to go from here but down.