There are four main locations where important events take place in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.  The meeting place, referred to by Golding as “the palm terrace,” represents the boys’ attempts to form a civilized society, since this is where they initially gather and where they hold their meetings.  It is “roughly a triangle; but irregular and sketchy, like everything they made.”  Located on a sandy, grassy ledge, it faces the lagoon, near the bathing pool. Past storms have toppled palm trees, which the boys use to sit on. The chief’s log sits nearest the edge, so that Ralph faces the reality of the jungle during meetings, and the boys face the immense antagonist, the ocean.

The next important spot is the mountain top.  It is a place that always seems to give the boys a dose of reality, from the first time Ralph and Jack climb it and discover that they’re on an island, to the time Piggy scolds them for acting “Like a pack of kids!” when they burn down part of the island and a littlun goes missing, to their failed signal fire and the first real argument between their leaders. The mountain rises out of the jungle in roughly the middle of the boat-shaped island.  The back side of it angles down sharply into jungle.  The front side is rocky, which the boys use to climb up.  On top there is one area that is rather flat, on which they build their signal fire. The mountain, like the rocky ledge on the beach, is made of pink-toned granite. It is very beautiful, but also looms over the boys as though mocking their attempts at rescue.

Less seen but equally important is Simon’s hiding place in the jungle.  He goes there to escape the other boys when he feels overwhelmed by their mocking or all the arguing and dissension.  In chapter three we get a detailed description of it.  “[T]he 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…The whole space was walled with dark aromatic bushes.” The fact that Simon goes here sometimes at night shows his deep intuition that it isn’t the jungle they should fear, but each other. It is from within this little nook that Simon witnesses Jack and his hunters savagely murder the mother pig, hack off her head, and put it on a stick as a sacrifice to the beast, resulting in Simon's famous interview with the Lord of the Flies in chapter 8.

A final place of importance in the novel is Castle Rock. The boys first discover it while searching the island for the beast. Jack describes it as “’The tail-end part, where the rocks are all piled up…The rocks make sort of a bridge.  There’s only one way up.’” It is located on the very tip of the island, a 15-foot rock ledge that sticks out into the ocean. On one side is the calm lagoon; on the other is the violent Pacific Ocean, crashing into the rocks below.  Such a contrast is perhaps symbolic of the good and evil we see in the boys themselves.  This outcropping becomes the convenient location for Jack’s tribe, since it is easy to defend.  It’s where Piggy dies when Roger levers a rock down onto him, and it's the place where the murderous hunt for Ralph begins.  This “castle,” then, represents the lair for the evil inside the boys, which savagely spills out during their time on the island.

Describe the island in William Golding's Lord of the Flies.

In the opening paragraph of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, the author makes it clear that this is a tropical island. It is lush and green and beautiful--and running right through all this beautiful green lushness is a "scar" left by the cabin of the airplane when it crashed last night. This prepares us for both beauty and ugliness on the rest of the island.

This is an island, so of course there is a beach; this particular beach also has a lagoon. This will become the meeting place for the boys throughout the novel.

[T]he 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.

Here the boys will make plans and have some fun, but it will also be the last place where civilized behavior will exist. Eventually the lagoon will be abandoned altogether.

The island also has a mountain. When Jack, Ralph, and Simon explore the mountain, they discover an entirely different terrain than the jungle or the beach. Here there are large rocks and boulders, and they form a kind of structure with a bridge which the boys call a "fort." It is this fort which will eventually become the headquarters for Jack and his tribe of "savages."

Clearly this is a beautiful tropical island; however, it is a flawed beauty, symbolic of the evil which comes from having no restraints or authority. 

How is the island described in Lord of the Flies?

The uninhabited tropical island, where the boys crash-land, is depicted as a tranquil paradise. There is an abundance of edible fruit on the island and wild pigs that the boys can hunt for meat. There is a beautiful beach, a deep swimming pool, and a large platform, where the boys hold their assemblies. Although the weather is extremely hot during the day, the boys have an adequate amount of shade in the forest. There are natural resources, fresh water, and readily available food. The island can symbolically represent the Biblical Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve were first tempted by the devil and committed the original sin. Despite the beautiful setting, the dark forest, the scar from the plane crash, and the foreboding rock formation are ominous elements, which suggest that everything is not perfect on the island. Golding purposely created a tranquil, comfortable environment in order to focus on the boys' failed attempts at establishing a civilization and their impending descent into complete savagery in order to examine humanity's inherent wickedness.

The island where the castaway boys land on Lord of the Flies would be considered a tropical paradise under most circumstances. Despite the terrible way in which the boys arrive, the island should be a place where they can spend their time frolicking in the surf and relaxing on the beach. The island and the surrounding waters provide them with everything needed to survive: Food (especially wild pigs) and water are available on the island, and the waters are filled with fish and crustaceans. But instead of biding their time enjoying the surroundings while awaiting their inevitable rescue, the boys regress into a primal group of bloodthirsty killers.