In the midst of a raging war, a
plane evacuating a group of schoolboys from Britain is shot down
over a deserted tropical island. Two of the boys, Ralph and Piggy,
discover a conch shell on the beach, and Piggy realizes it could
be used as a horn to summon the other boys. Once assembled, the
boys set about electing a leader and devising a way to be rescued.
They choose Ralph as their leader, and Ralph appoints another boy,
Jack, to be in charge of the boys who will hunt food for the entire
group.
Ralph, Jack, and another boy, Simon, set off on an expedition
to explore the island. When they return, Ralph declares that they
must light a signal fire to attract the attention of passing ships.
The boys succeed in igniting some dead wood by focusing sunlight
through the lenses of Piggy’s eyeglasses. However, the boys pay
more attention to playing than to monitoring the fire, and the flames
quickly engulf the forest. A large swath of dead wood burns out
of control, and one of the youngest boys in the group disappears,
presumably having burned to death.
At first, the boys enjoy their life without grown-ups
and spend much of their time splashing in the water and playing
games. Ralph, however, complains that they should be maintaining
the signal fire and building huts for shelter. The hunters fail
in their attempt to catch a wild pig, but their leader, Jack, becomes
increasingly preoccupied with the act of hunting.
When a ship passes by on the horizon one day, Ralph and
Piggy notice, to their horror, that the signal fire—which had been
the hunters’ responsibility to maintain—has burned out. Furious,
Ralph accosts Jack, but the hunter has just returned with his first
kill, and all the hunters seem gripped with a strange frenzy, reenacting
the chase in a kind of wild dance. Piggy criticizes Jack, who hits
Piggy across the face. Ralph blows the conch shell and reprimands
the boys in a speech intended to restore order. At the meeting,
it quickly becomes clear that some of the boys have started to become
afraid. The littlest boys, known as “littluns,” have been troubled
by nightmares from the beginning, and more and more boys now believe that
there is some sort of beast or monster lurking on the island. The older
boys try to convince the others at the meeting to think rationally,
asking where such a monster could possibly hide during the daytime.
One of the littluns suggests that it hides in the sea—a proposition
that terrifies the entire group.
Not long after the meeting, some military planes engage
in a battle high above the island. The boys, asleep below, do not
notice the flashing lights and explosions in the clouds. A parachutist
drifts to earth on the signal-fire mountain, dead. Sam and Eric,
the twins responsible for watching the fire at night, are asleep
and do not see the parachutist land. When the twins wake up, they
see the enormous silhouette of his parachute and hear the strange
flapping noises it makes. Thinking the island beast is at hand,
they rush back to the camp in terror and report that the beast has
attacked them.
The boys organize a hunting expedition to search for the
monster. Jack and Ralph, who are increasingly at odds, travel up
the mountain. They see the silhouette of the parachute
from a distance and think that it looks like a huge, deformed ape.
The group holds a meeting at which Jack and Ralph tell the others
of the sighting. Jack says that Ralph is a coward and that he should
be removed from office, but the other boys refuse to vote Ralph
out of power. Jack angrily runs away down the beach, calling all
the hunters to join him. Ralph rallies the remaining boys
to build a new signal fire, this time on the beach rather than on
the mountain. They obey, but before they have finished the task,
most of them have slipped away to join Jack.
Jack declares himself the leader of the new tribe of hunters
and organizes a hunt and a violent, ritual slaughter of a sow to
solemnize the occasion. The hunters then decapitate the sow and
place its head on a sharpened stake in the jungle as an offering
to the beast. Later, encountering the bloody, fly-covered head,
Simon has a terrible vision, during which it seems to him that the
head is speaking. The voice, which he imagines as belonging to the
Lord of the Flies, says that Simon will never escape him, for he
exists within all men. Simon faints. When he wakes up,
he goes to the mountain, where he sees the dead parachutist. Understanding
then that the beast does not exist externally but rather within
each individual boy, Simon travels to the beach to tell the others
what he has seen. But the others are in the
midst of a chaotic revelry—even Ralph and Piggy have joined Jack’s
feast—and when they see Simon’s shadowy figure emerge from the jungle,
they fall upon him and kill him with their bare hands and teeth.
The following morning, Ralph and Piggy discuss what they
have done. Jack’s hunters attack them and their few followers and
steal Piggy’s glasses in the process. Ralph’s group travels
to Jack’s stronghold in an attempt to make Jack see reason, but
Jack orders Sam and Eric tied up and fights with Ralph. In the ensuing
battle, one boy, Roger, rolls a boulder down the mountain, killing
Piggy and shattering the conch shell. Ralph barely manages to escape
a torrent of spears.
Ralph hides for the rest of the night and the following
day, while the others hunt him like an animal. Jack has the other
boys ignite the forest in order to smoke Ralph out of his hiding
place. Ralph stays in the forest, where he discovers and destroys
the sow’s head, but eventually, he is forced out onto the beach,
where he knows the other boys will soon arrive to kill him. Ralph
collapses in exhaustion, but when he looks up, he sees a British
naval officer standing over him. The officer’s ship noticed the
fire raging in the jungle. The other boys reach the beach and stop
in their tracks at the sight of the officer. Amazed at
the spectacle of this group of bloodthirsty, savage children, the
officer asks Ralph to explain. Ralph is overwhelmed by the knowledge
that he is safe but, thinking about what has happened on the island,
he begins to weep. The other boys begin to sob as well. The officer
turns his back so that the boys may regain their composure.
