Lord of the Flies

The conch and Piggy's glasses are the novel's clearest instruments of civilization, and Golding is exact about how they fail: the conch loses its authority gradually, through ignored turns and shouted-down votes, before Roger ever needs to smash it outright, and the glasses go from communal fire-making tool to Jack's stolen war trophy the moment usefulness starts to matter more than fairness. Piggy's own death — crushed by the boulder that also destroys the conch — collapses reason and rule of law in a single blow, and Golding stages it as an afterthought in the middle of a raid rather than a climax, which is the point: civilization on the island was never defeated in open battle, it was simply outgrown and discarded.

Simon is the only boy who works out what the beast actually is, and the novel kills him almost in the same breath. His fevered vision of the pig's head on a stick — 'Lord of the Flies,' a literal translation of Beelzebub, addressing him directly — states the theme plainly enough that it barely counts as symbolism anymore: the beast isn't a creature to be hunted and speared, it's what's already loose in the boys themselves. Golding then has the tribe kill Simon in a frenzied ritual dance the instant he stumbles out of the dark to tell them exactly that, mistaking the messenger for the monster in the most literal possible enactment of a society that murders its own prophets.

Golding surrounds the island with an unstated but insistent context: the boys were evacuated because a global war was already underway, and the naval officer who eventually comes ashore is a combatant in that same conflict, cruiser and all. His clipped disapproval of the boys' 'not-quite' English standard of behavior — delivered while Ralph sobs over Piggy and Simon — is the novel's driest joke: the adult world arriving to rescue children from savagery is itself engaged in organized savagery on a far larger scale, just one with uniforms, chains of command, and no one calling it that.