“Microcosm”: Analysis and Illumination

 Note: This is the companion piece to my Lord of the Flies Chapter 13, Microcosm, which may be found in the short stories section.

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            “Microcosm” is the title of chapter thirteen, my additional installment to William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies. I chose to write this extra chapter because although the original ending of the novel, which had Ralph being chased onto the beach by Jack’s tribe of savages and being unexpectedly rescued by a naval officer, was effective in that it was abrupt and ironic thus leaving the novel open for discussion on various levels, I wished to take one of those levels and explore it further based on my own interpretation of the ending. Therefore, the main purpose of “Microcosm” is to build on the irony hinted at by Golding; that is, the fact that Ralph and the boys are rescued, but they leave one conflict behind only to head back into a much larger conflict, the war that caused their evacuation in the first place. The irony goes on to develop the theme that the evil nature of man is within and all around; it cannot be escaped simply by moving to a new physical location or society.

            The installment may be roughly divided into two parts, the first being Ralph, Sam, and Eric’s conversation aboard the navy cruiser, and the second being Ralph’s search for his parents and his discovery of their deaths. In the first section, Ralph is initially uneasy about his near-death experience on the island and the evil that he witnessed; he has constant flashbacks and associates a pocketknife with Jack and savagery. However, when he attempts to explain his troubled feelings to Sam and Eric, the twins are as good-natured as always and tell him to forget about the island. They express that the only thing that matters is that they are going home to all “the majesty of adult life” (pg. 102, Lord of the Flies). Ralph is somewhat convinced and the gloomy atmosphere that was developed by the stormy weather of the first two paragraphs is replaced by a cheerful one as a result of Ralph’s faulty pasty-tossing and the ensuing pillow fight.

 The second section of “Microcosm” intentionally contrasts with the first: Ralph enters with optimism and is then crushed by the larger conflict that he has become a part of. Little events foreshadow the tragic conclusion; Ralph smells the essence of war while aboard the cruiser, he mistakes a stranger for his mother, and then he is told by his father’s commanding officer about the deaths of his parents because of the war. This stark contrast is to illuminate the fact that even though at the end of the actual novel, the naval officer “saves” Ralph, he appears abruptly, is terribly ignorant of his own evil while admonishing the boys, and then is whisked away in three pages as the novel ends. He appears as an all-powerful savior, coming to bring the boys back to order and civilization, but the reader is aware that the whole time Ralph and Jack are facing off on the island, the adults are fighting an even bloodier war on a world scale. Just because the boys move back into the adult world does not mean that they escape the evil that is roused from within them on the island. All around them, the people who they look up to are slaves to that evil; they lie, torture, and kill. Then to justify it, just as Jack used an imaginary enemy, the “beast”, as an excuse to congregate and engage in violence (e.g. the killing of Simon), the adults claim they are “fighting for their country” against an enemy. In “Microcosm”, I have represented this aspect in Lieutenant Commander Jones’s speech to Ralph:

“I tell myself that if being away from the land I love is what it takes to keep the Reds from blasting it to pieces, so be it. We’re the good lads and we’ll be fighting till the end!”

Jones explains that he fights to protect his country from the enemy, referred to as the “Reds”, and insists that the British are the “good lads” in the war. “Fighting for one’s country” and equating nationalism with virtue certainly seems admirable, but it still boils down to senseless violence and man’s natural propensity towards amorality. In the words of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we are marching against an enemy.” The reality of the “bad” music and reasons will not change no matter what the justification or the demographic of the “marching” group; the “badness” is within man himself and is a constant, which is one of the major themes of Lord of the Flies. In “Microcosm”, Ralph may think that England means the comfort of order and of home, but he returns only to find that man’s inherent evil has robbed him of both. He then reacts in the only way a twelve-year-old boy trapped between childhood and maturity knows how: he screams.

            In conclusion, “Microcosm” is a thirteenth chapter written for Lord of the Flies in order to illuminate the fundamental irony with which Golding ends the novel: the adult world may seem to be what saves the boys from evil, but the adults are themselves engaged in a bloody war. One of the fundamental themes of the novel is that one cannot simply run from the evil; it always follows because it is within oneself and may rear its ugly head at any time, in any place.