Indecisiveness In Lord Of The Flies

Human beings have a tendency to make choices which often lead to their own demise, or as Oscar Wilde wrote in The Duchess of Padua, “We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.” This statement is exemplified in William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, during which, young boys are stranded on an abandoned island and forced to survive. Three of the boys, Jack, Ralph, and Simon, make decisions that lead them to their own collapses. Jack’s jealousy and ego cause him to lose his civility and he becomes a savage killer. Ralph’s indecisiveness and cowardice turn him into prey, hunted by the other boys. Lastly, Simon’s weak disposition and reclusiveness make him pay with the ultimate price, his life. Each of these boys decline …show more content…
He begins as one of the members of Jack 's hunting group but later becomes a friend of Ralph. One of the first things learned about Simon is that he has a weak disposition. When he fainted from the heat in the beginning of the novel, Jack commented, "He 's always throwing a faint… He did it in Gib.; and Addis; and at matins over the precentor," (20). Immediately it is made obvious that Simon is unsuited for the physical endurance needed to survive on the island. Furthermore, Simon is regarded with some suspicion among the group because he often disappears without anyone knowing where he is. He has a secret hiding spot from which he spies on the other boys. Specifically, he watches Jack and the hunters kill and behead a pig. The text states, “All at once they [the hunters] were running away… toward the open beach. Simon stayed where he was, a small brown image, concealed by the leaves,” (137). It is after this that Simon begins to hallucinate a conversation with the severed pig’s head, referring to it as the Lord of the Flies. The Lord of the Flies reiterates Simon’s fear that the other boys think he’s crazy. The Lord of the Flies tells him, “You’d better run off and play with the others. They think you’re batty. You don’t want Ralph to think you’re batty, do you?... And Piggy, and Jack?” (143). He then passes out and when he comes to, he searches for the beast in an attempt to prove these fears wrong. When he does find that the beast was just a dead soldier, the darkness and his sickly appearance cause him to be mistaken for a real beast by the other boys. Upon returning to the group, he is surrounded and killed. Simon’s frailty, secretiveness, and fears cause him to stumble into his own