Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, is about a group of British school boys stranded on a deserted island who must fend for themselves. In chapter 1, the reader is introduced to Ralph and Piggy, two main characters in the book. In fact, when the boys ultimately break into factions, Ralph becomes the leader of one group.
Their first view of the island comes in that first chapter, when they want to get a better look at their surroundings. The author writes:
Ralph disentangled himself cautiously and stole away through the branches. In a few seconds the fat boy’s grunts were behind him and he was hurrying toward the screen that still lay between him and the lagoon. He climbed over a broken trunk and was out of the jungle.
The shore was fledged with palm trees. These stood or leaned or reclined against the light and their green feathers were a hundred feet up in the air. The ground beneath them was a bank covered with coarse grass, torn everywhere by the upheavals of fallen trees, scattered with decaying coconuts and palm saplings. Behind this was the darkness of the forest proper and the open space of the scar. Ralph stood, one hand against a grey trunk, and screwed up his eyes against the shimmering water. Out there, perhaps a mile away, the white surf flinked on a coral reef, and beyond that the open sea was dark blue. Within the irregular arc of coral the lagoon was still as a mountain lake—blue of all shades and shadowy green and purple. The beach between the palm terrace and the water was a thin stick, endless apparently, for to Ralph’s left the perspectives of palm and beach and water drew to a point at infinity; and always, almost visible, was the heat.
The boys have no tools and must find food. The palm trees and coconuts become an initial source of nutrition for them. Where the trees are particularly dense, the boys see it as a "forest." In addition, the boys find that there are fish swimming in the translucent waters around the island close enough for them to catch. Further on, Golding provides more description of the island:
Ralph stood up and trotted along to the right.
Here the beach was interrupted abruptly by the square motif of the landscape; a great platform of pink granite thrust up uncompromisingly through forest and terrace and sand and lagoon to make a raised jetty four feet high. The top of this was covered with a thin layer of soil and coarse grass and shaded with young palm trees. There was not enough soil for them to grow to any height and when they reached perhaps twenty feet they fell and dried, forming a criss-cross pattern of trunks, very convenient to sit on. The palms that still stood made a green roof, covered on the underside with a quivering tangle of reflections from the lagoon. Ralph hauled himself...
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onto this platform, noted the coolness and shade, shut one eye, and decided that the shadows on his body were really green. He picked his way to the seaward edge of the platform and stood looking down into the water. It was clear to the bottom and bright with the efflorescence of tropical weed and coral. A school of tiny, glittering fish flicked hither and thither.
Moreover, the boys find a natural wading pool that they will use to cool themselves from the intense heat:
Beyond the platform there was more enchantment. Some act of God— a typhoon perhaps, or the storm that had accompanied his own arrival— had banked sand inside the lagoon so that there was a long, deep pool in the beach with a high ledge of pink granite at the further end. Ralph had been deceived before now by the specious appearance of depth in a beach pool and he approached this one preparing to be disappointed. But the island ran true to form and the incredible pool, which clearly was only invaded by the sea at high tide, was so deep at one end as to be dark green. Ralph inspected the whole thirty yards carefully and then plunged in. The water was warmer than his blood and he might have been swimming in a huge bath.
As the boys explore the island, they move away from the beach and discover craggy uneven land that contains rocks and cliffs:
The pink granite of the next cliff was further back from the creepers and trees so that they could trot up the path. This again led into more open forest so that they had a glimpse of the spread sea. With openness came the sun; it dried the sweat that had soaked their clothes in the dark, damp heat. At last the way to the top looked like a scramble over pink rock, with no more plunging through darkness. The boys chose their way through defiles and over heaps of sharp stone.
“Look! Look!”
High over this end of the island, the shattered rocks lifted up their stacks and chimneys.
As they climb these cliffs, the height allows them to obtain a better vantage point to determine the overall island:
They were on the lip of a circular hollow in the side of the mountain. This was filled with a blue flower, a rock plant of some sort, and the overflow hung down the vent and spilled lavishly among the canopy of the forest. The air was thick with butterflies, lifting, fluttering, settling.
Beyond the hollow was the square top of the mountain and soon they were standing on it.
They had guessed before that this was an island: clambering among the pink rocks, with the sea on either side, and the crystal heights of air, they had known by some instinct that the sea lay on every side. But there seemed something more fitting in leaving the last word till they stood on the top, and could see a circular horizon of water.
In chapter one as the boys are first exploring the island, they make an ascent so they can get a better view of their surroundings. As they approach the mountain, it is described as follows:
"The most usual feature of the rock was a pink cliff surmounted by a skewed block; and that again surmounted, and that again, till the pinkness became a stack of balanced rock projecting through the looped fantasy of the forest creepers."
Simon, a boy comfortable with solitude, finds a special, isolated place that some critics view as a sanctuary. It is described in chapter three as
"...a place where more sunshine fell. Since they had not so far to go for light the creepers had woven a great mat that hung at the side of an open space in the jungle; for here a patch of rock came close to the surface and would not allow more than little plants and ferns to grow. The whole space was walled with dark aromatic bushes, and was a bowl of heat and light."
In chapter six, as tensions among the boys escalate, Ralph walks with Jack and the others in search of the beast. From a new vantage point,
"He paused on the narrow neck and looked down. Soon, in a matter of centuries, the sea would make an island of the castle. On the right hand was the lagoon, troubled by the open sea; and on the left— Ralph shuddered. The lagoon had protected them from the Pacific: and for some reason only Jack had gone right down to the water on the other side. Now he saw the landsman’s view of the swell and it seemed like the breathing of some stupendous creature. Slowly the waters sank among the rocks, revealing pink tables of granite, strange growths of coral, polyp, and weed. Down, down, the waters went, whispering like the wind among the heads of the forest. There was one flat rock there, spread like a table, and the waters sucking down on the four weedy sides made them seem like cliffs. Then the sleeping leviathan breathed out, the waters rose, the weed streamed, and the water boiled over the table rock with a roar. There was no sense of the passage of waves; only this minute-long fall and rise and fall."
Golding makes many contrasts between the areas that the boys (except for Simon) despoil in their crude efforts to "civilize" the island and the pristine, untouched areas. Through his use of the settings in the novel, Golding observes and condemns man's disregard for the beauty of nature, but at the same time he argues that nature is elemental and powerful and has the capacity to outlast mankind.
There are clear descriptions of locations on the island throughout the novel. At the beginning of the first chapter, the shore is described:
The shore was fledged with palm trees. These stood or leaned or reclined against the light and their green feathers were a hundred feet up in the air.
This description coninues with images of the trees, the grass, and the outskirts of the forest.
Later, in Chapter 9, the mountain is described in the midst of a storm:
Over the island the build-up of clouds continued. A steady current of heated air rose all day from the mountain and was thrust to ten thousand feet; revolving masses of gas piled up the static until the air was ready to explode.
Often Golding uses the descriptions of places on the island to develop the tone of the scene and to foreshadow events to come. The island holds much mystery and potential at the beginning of the novel, yet by Chapter 9, there is incredible tension among the boys that foreshadows the first death. Descriptions of other places on the island are equally representative: the darkness of the forest showing the fear of the boys, the sparkling waters that provide only a mirage of being rescued.