Does chapter 2 of Lord of the Flies contain pathetic fallacy?

Pathetic fallacy is a literary device in which emotional states are attributed to inanimate objects or objects of nature. It is similar to personification, but pathetic fallacy has the deliberate function of creating a mood by attributing emotions to things that cannot literally have emotions. In chapter 2 of Lord of the Flies, both the island and the fire are described as having emotions, so pathetic fallacy does exist in this chapter.

When the boys first build the bonfire, they are excited by it. The wood they have piled on the fire is said to have emotions, and those emotions match the mood of the boys: "Whole limbs yielded passionately to the yellow flames." This is an example of a pathetic fallacy.

When the fire gets out of control, it is personified as an animal. These descriptions are examples of personification, but not pathetic fallacy: "Small flames ... crawled away," "one patch ... scrambled up like a bright squirrel," and "the flames, as thought they were a kind of wild life, crept as a jaguar creeps." Since no emotion is attributed to these personifications, they are not pathetic fallacies.

However, this description is a pathetic fallacy: "a quarter mile square of forest was savage with smoke and flame." The word "savage" implies anger, especially in the context of two paragraphs later, where Ralph becomes "savage" and tells Piggy to shut up.

Later, Golding writes, "the fire growled at them." Whether this is a pathetic fallacy or merely personification is debatable. A growl is usually an angry warning, so one could say the "growl" is a pathetic fallacy. Describing a tree with creepers that "rose for a moment into view, agonized, and went down again" is another pathetic fallacy at the end of the chapter. The last sentence of the chapter refers to the "unfriendly side" of the mountain; that could also be considered a pathetic fallacy, attributing the emotion of unfriendliness to the burning mountain.

These pathetic fallacies are subtle, but they reflect the boys' emotions and help set the mood of the chapter.

How does the storm exemplify pathetic fallacy in "Lord of the Flies"?

A pathetic fallacy is a type of personification that gives human emotions and qualities to nature, which reflects the mood of the story.

At the beginning of chapter 9, a terrible storm is brewing, which foreshadows the dramatic event that will take place later on in the chapter. Golding personifies the storm by mentioning that the clouds "brooded" as the storm begins to form in the sky. As the chapter progresses, a violent storm erupts as Jack and his savages engage in their ritual dance. Lighting strikes and heavy rain falls as the wind whips throughout the dark island. Unfortunately, Simon stumbles from the forest, and the boys initially mistake him for the beast. As Simon crawls onto the beach, the boys savagely murder him as the rain crashes down from above. The storm would be considered a pathetic fallacy because it imitates the confused, chaotic emotions of the boys on the island. The storm also represents the violent release of emotions as they brutally murder Simon. 

The storm that batters the island can be interpreted as a pathetic fallacy--the attribution of human emotions or characteristics to nature--because it embodies the chaos and savagery of the hunters in Chapter 9 of Lord of the Flies.

When Simon recovers from his seizure, he struggles through the creepers and staggers against the battering wind as he attempts to return to the others and report to them his revelations about the "beast."  On the grassy platform, the boys celebrate their hunt.  With the approaching storm, Ralph and Piggy feel trepidation, so they join the others.  As the thunderstorm builds, rain begins to fall; the littl'uns panic and run.  Then, in imitation of the natural turbulence, Jack orders the ritual dance, and Roger pretends to be the pig.  The boys chant, "Kill the beast! Cut his throat!  Spill his blood!"  At this point, the beast--the body of Simon falls over the steep rock onto the beach.  Simultaneously, the "clouds opened and let down the rain like a waterfall" and the gale-like wind blows as the parachutist falls and is swept out to sea.

Somewhere over the darkend curve of the world the sun and moon were pulling, and the film of water on the earth planet was held, bulging slightly on one side while the solid core turned.  The great wave of the tide moved farther along the island and the water lifted.  Softly, surrounded by a fringe of inquisitive bright creatures, itself a silver shape beneath the steadfast constellations, Simon's dead body moved out toward the open sea.

Not only does the storm imitate the turbulence of the anarchy that has overcome the island, but it eradicates the intuitive Simon who is the only one who has understood the evil within man, the beast.

Why does the weather on the island become hostile and ominous after Simon's death?

The increasingly hostile and ominous weather perfectly matches the mood on the island. Everything started off like an awfully big adventure for the stranded schoolboys. Free from adult supervision, they felt liberated, able to do whatever they wanted. But as the rivalry between Ralph and Jack develops, the mood among the boys starts turning sour. And as this rivalry rapidly descends into outright savagery and bloodshed, the storm clouds start to gather over the island, both literally and figuratively. It's no coincidence that the storm is at its most fearsome in the wake of Simon's death. Goldman is driving home the point that there's now no turning back; the last vestiges of civilized order on the island have been completely swept away once and for all. From here on in, the boys are at the mercy of the wild, uncontrollable forces of nature, as represented by Jack and Roger.

It's called pathetic fallacy. It's when a writer uses elements of the natural world (weather, nature, animals, and so on) to reflect what happens in the book.

Golding uses the weather and the island to suggest or foreshadow events in the novel throughout. So, right at the start, we learn that the plane ominously was shot down during a storm:

Some act of God— a typhoon perhaps, or the storm that had accompanied his own arrival—had banked sand inside the lagoon...

And, after Simon's death, as the storm clears, there's an unusual section at the end of the chapter in which the weather clears and nature seems to almost reabsorb Simon: in the sky, the anger/aggression of JAck becomes Simon's relaxed sensitivity:

Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars.

One last example. On the first page, Golding includes an ominous little image which gives the impression that the island might turn out to be negative, though it seems like paradise:

He was clambering heavily among the creepers and broken trunks when a bird, a vision of red and yellow, flashed upwards with a witch-like cry...

"A witch-like cry". Read the paragraph again, and feel the spookiness of that image. Golding wants you to be spooked - but does it subtly through pathetic fallacy.

What is a pathetic fallacy example showing fear in Golding's Lord of the Flies?

The word "pathetic" is often, hastily, interpreted as a value judgment, implying that something is weak or inferior, mostly because this is the way the word is commonly used in language today. However, it has etymological roots in the term "pathos," which simply means feeling, emotion or sentiment. In rhetoric, pathos is the means by which we recognize and appeal to the emotions of the audience, and lies in contrast to logos, or logic, which deals strictly in facts. A "pathetic fallacy," therefore, is not a "pitiful mistake," but the misattribution of emotions, typically to an inanimate object or animal. For example, assuming that predators are angry and vicious, or that the sea or a mountain could be cruel and uncaring.

There are no cases where the boys attribute fear to inanimate objects on the island, although they do seem to attribute fear to the pigs when they are being hunted on a few occasions, particularly the piglet that Jack hesitates over killing in Chapter 2. However, pathetic fallacies that "show fear" could easily reveal fear that the boys feel, rather than fear attributed to another. In this interpretations, we can see many occasions of such;

• Simon hallucinates a cruel omniscience to the Lord of the Flies (the pig's head) which mockingly comforts him over his fears of social rejection.
• The ocean, on the far side of the island, reflects Ralph's increasing sense of isolation and desperation. The ocean seems to be completely indifferent to them, while simultaneously operating as their greatest true threat. Ralph is afraid they're going to die on the island. 
• The Beast is an embodiment of fear. One aspect of the Beast that the boys generally fail to recognize is the fact that it becomes progressively more powerful and unbelievable to the rational mind as the story goes on; first it was a 6-year-old's nightmare, and by the end, it has become an inscrutable, sea-dwelling, child-eating ghost. In a sense, the boys actually need the Beast, as a means of giving their fears a name, and the fact that it grows more powerful is a means of allowing it to continue to exist each time it is "proven" to be nonexistent.

Why is pathetic fallacy used in Lord of the Flies by William Golding?

The word "pathetic," in modern and common usage, is typically defined in terms of being sad, weak or contemptible. However, the word is actually rooted in the Greek word "pathos," which means something closer to "feeling" or "emotion." Thus, a pathetic fallacy is an error in feeling, or, more accurately, the misattribution of feeling to a thing that does not feel, such as saying the sun is cruel.

Ascribing human feelings to non-human things is probably a deeply-rooted, ancient practice that may have been employed in an attempt to understand the many mysterious aspects of the natural world, as well as giving rise to numerous myths and religious beliefs. Characterizing objects according to perceived qualities and attitudes may help in shaping human behaviors towards them; for example, qualifying wet rocks as "treacherous" clearly communicates that they are untrustworthy and one must exercise caution or avoid them in order to stay safe. 

Because the boys lack protective adults or tools, we may think of them as resorting to a more primal nature, and accompanying this is a greater degree of pathetic fallacy, in order to understand their place in the world and their relationship to the various inanimate forces around them. 

From a literary perspective, pathetic fallacy is a tool that helps to create other literary elements, such as mood and characterization. We not only learn about Golding's characters by the fact, and the type, of pathetic fallacy they perform, but also how they feel and how Golding wishes to depict their reality.