Lord of the Flies - Chapter 3 Summary and Analysis
Summary and analysis of Lord of the Flies, Chapter 3
Hey everyone, BuffEnglish here. Chapter 3 in Lord of the Flies introduces something very important to us. If chapters 1 and 2 gave us a good foundation for the story, a good overview of the boys, their circumstances, and their opportunities and challenges, chapter 3 brings us something we have to pay attention to: CHANGE.
We see this with the opening descriptions of the chapter involving Jack. Jack is out in the forest alone, hunting. But he’s not quite the same Jack as we met earlier. We get the idea that the boys have been on the island for a little while now…perhaps a week. And yes, many of his characteristics are still the same, but our attention is drawn toward his appearance. Now he’s described as “dog-like,” moving “shadow like,” with a sharpened stick, long hair, tattered shorts, flared nostrils, and even ape-like. He is beginning to become a true hunter, but the multiple comparisons of him to an animal - along with his clothing and hair completing changing from the cloaked choir boy we saw earlier - demonstrate a moving away from the “civilized” character who was guided and bounded by the expectations of society towards…something else.
Jack, though, is not successful at hunting, and despite throwing his spear towards a pig, his prey gets away. He then returned to the beach and finds Ralph near the lagoon who is trying - and failing - to build shelters. The shelters are falling apart, and everyone except Simon has gone off to play. It’s interesting to see the parallel that both Jack and Ralph began their tasks with enthusiastic help, but were eventually left alone and eventually fail at their desired tasks. Jack, though, seemed to prefer the solitude of hunting while Ralph laments the laziness and short-sightedness of the boys. Ultimately the opening of this chapter shows the furtive attempts at developing the skills - such as hunting and shelter building, and the commitment to go with them - needed to build their little civilization. They are all still just kids. Although there are coconuts full of fresh water set aside in the shade…so the boys are at least organized enough to think of and maintain easy access to drinking water.
Ralph addresses this ultimately lack of commitment and responsibility: “And they keep running off…They're off bathing, or eating, or playing…I bet if I blew the conch this minute, they'd come running. Then we'd be, you know, very solemn, and someone would say we ought to build a jet, or a submarine, or a TV set. When the meeting was over they'd work for five minutes, then wander off or go hunting." Ralph as a leader recognizes the fundamental shortcomings of the boys, but as a boy he is unable to do much to fix it.
And Jack isn’t any better - in fact he’s arguable worse. Chapter 3 makes it monumentally obvious that Jack is solely fixated on getting meat. But who can blame him? I probably would too, if all I had to eat was questionable bananas that gave me the runs. But Jack is driven by much more than the desire for meat. “He tried to convey the compulsion to track down and kill that was swallowing him up.” If it was hunger that drove him, we might understand that. But there is an unutterable, animal instinct for blood that sinisterly seems to drive him.
We especially see this when their discussion brings up the idea of being rescued, and Jack surprisingly seems to have to remember what “rescue” meant. He had, apparently, been so obsessed with becoming a hunter. Jack is rather annoying in this chapter as almost all he thinks about and expresses has something to do with hunting. He talks so obsessively about hunting and finding pigs instead of rescue, that Ralph has to correct him: “I was talking about smoke! Don't you want to be rescued? All you can talk about is pig, pig, pig!”
The next part of the Jack and Ralph’s conversation is equally unutterable as Jack’s compulsion to kill. Jack and Ralph acknowledge that there is a small but palpable fear beginning to brew amongst the children, and Simon - making his entrance into the conversation - calls it out directly: "As if," said Simon, "the beastie, the beastie or the snake-thing, was real.” And then they suggest, “as if this wasn’t a good island” contradicting Ralph’s initial assessment from Chapter 2 of their island being “good.” And Jack confesses that when he’s hunting, “You can feel as if you're not hunting, but―being hunted, as if something's behind you all the time in the jungle."
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