Chapter 11: Castle Rock

In Castle Rock, the 11th chapter in Lord of the Flies by William Golding, a few key events take place that help lead the reader toward the end of the story. In the opening scene of the chapter, we see that Piggy, Ralph, and Samneric (Sam and Eric) are the only people remaining on the island who are not either dead or savages. In the previous chapter, the four boys had been attacked by Jack and the savages. Unfortunately, the larger group pounded the four boys into next week and also managed to steal Piggy's broken glasses. The only glimmer of hope left for them at this point is the conch, which Piggy holds on to dearly. But, without the glasses, there can be no fire- nothing to signal any nearby boats. Piggy, feeling as defeated as Ralph (who still remained unable to get a fire started), says, "Course it's not use, Ralph. Now we got no fire."
(169) After some discussion on the matter, Piggy, Ralph, and Samneric choose to go to Jack and the savages to tell them off for the bad deeds they'd committed, and to ask for Piggy's stolen glasses back. On their journey there, they manage to spot something in the distance. "Sam touched [Ralph]'s arm. 'Smoke.' There was a tiny smudge of smoke wavering into the air on the other side of the rock."(174) Soon after, Ralph and his friends are spotted by one of the savages. He then blows the conch and brings all of the savages together for what he called "an assembly". After this, we are informed of the presence of Roger- "High above, Roger took his hands off the lever and leaned out to see what was going on."(175) Next, Roger throws a stone down between the twins to get their attention. We can see a sort of unusual change within Roger.. "Some source of power began to pulse in Roger's body."(175) After Ralph questions the savages as to the whereabouts of Jack, Jack comes out of the forest flanked by two hunters. After yelling at each other for a while regarding Jack's thievery, Jack and Ralph clash weapons, but soon give up the ordeal. Suddenly, Samneric are taken and tied up by the savages. After more yelling, the "climax of the chapter" occurs. Roger, high above, prepares to push a massive boulder down on to the unknowing group. Roger, "with a sense of delirious abandonment, leaned all of his weight on the lever." Unfortunately, Piggy happened to be right under the falling stone- "the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist... Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across the square red rock in the sea." Ralph's only choice at this point is to run away- leaving Samneric to be tortured by Roger. This climactic occurence near the end of the chapter can be connected to a real-life experiment which went on only forty or so years ago- The Milgram Experiment. In this experiment, an innocent person would be taken in to a mysterious room by a scientist. The scientist would then claim that the panel in front of the innocent person from the street (we'll call him bob) delivered shocks to somebody in a different room (we'll call them 'the actor' because this person in the different room was actually an actor and was not really recieving these shocks). Bob would ask the actor a question, and if the actor answered incorrectly, Bob would shock the actor, starting with 15 volts and going all of the way up to 400 volts. The apparent idea of the experiment was to prove whether or not pain helped people to learn better. But, in reality, it was to see how far people would go delivering shocks to a person they could not see before they stopped and walked away. Unfortunately, statistics showed more than half of the people who were experimented on went to 400 volts on the panel, just because a scientist told them to. Other variations on the experiment showed that much fewer people went all of the way to 400 volts when they saw the effect of the electric shocks on the person they were shocking. To connect the book with this experiment, we can see that Roger was able to "go all the way"- kill Piggy- by pushing the boulder down on to him. Since Roger was very high above Piggy and could not see the person he was about to kill, it was very likely this was what allowed him to do it. So, chapter 11's book-changing event is the death of Piggy- whose real name we never really found out!