NovelGuide: Lord of the Flies: Novel Summary: Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Golding’s third chapter begins with Jack hunting for pigs in the jungle. Meanwhile, Ralph and Simon keep busy working on the shelters. Ralph becomes upset that he and Simon are doing all of the work, realizing that everyone else is "bathing, or eating, or playing."

Soon the rivalry between Ralph and Jack grows more tense when Ralph criticizes Jack for neither helping with the shelters nor having any success as a hunter. Ralph asks Jack indignantly, "Don’t you want to be rescued? All you can talk about is pig, pig, pig!" This is only a foreshadowing of the tension yet to come between these two.

Later in the conversation, Jack admits to Ralph that he too seems to sense the presence of the beast on the island. He explains, "If you’re hunting sometimes you catch yourself feeling as if...you’re not hunting, but— being hunted, as if something’s behind you all the time in the jungle." This is very telling because indeed there is something hunting Jack— himself. The evil nature of his own soul is preying on its good side— exemplified in Piggy and Ralph. All of the boys on the island (except perhaps Piggy) feel the beast, the anarchical side of themselves, growing in one way or another. Jack, however is the most susceptible to this spirit.

The last part of the chapter gives the reader a sense of Simon’s strange behavior. Simon already is portrayed as a martyr of sorts, though in a very small way in this case. He reaches up to the higher branches to give the littluns fruit from the jungle. Later, he crawls beneath the undergrowth, leaving the others to be by himself in this mysterious tropical paradise.