46 pages • 1 hour read
William GoldingLord of the Flies
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1954A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Beast from Air”
As the children sleep, they do not see the lights of an air battle high above them, nor do they see the parachute descending on the island. Sam and Eric, asleep when they are supposed to be tending the fire, also do not see the parachute until they wake before dawn and relight the fire. They can’t quite make out the parachute or the man in the darkness, so they think the beast has returned. They rush down the hill to wake Ralph, who calls an assembly. In the assembly, Ralph decides they must try to find the beast. Leaving Piggy with the littluns, Ralph, Jack, and the bigguns set off for the only part of the island they haven’t explored. Where the rock comes down from the mountain higher up, Ralph and Jack find a protected outcropping, which Jack says would make a great fort, easily defended. With some of his hunters, he begins pushing great rocks down into the sea, but Ralph says there is no food. He says they must build up the fire again to have any hope of rescue.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Shadows and Tall Trees”
Following Jack along the pig run, Ralph thinks how dirty he is. His hair is too long. His nails are eaten away. He thinks too of a house he used to live in, before the war began. Simon tells him he’ll get back to where he was, but Ralph isn’t sure. As they make their way toward the top of the mountain, a pig comes barreling along the path. Ralph’s thrown spear strikes it, but they lose it in the undergrowth. Ralph feels the thrill of the hunt, and with the other boys, pretends Robert is a boar. They close in on him. Ralph strikes him with the butt of his spear, and Robert begins to cry until they let him loose. He then says they need a real pig so that they can kill it, to which Jack says they should use a littlun. As they continue climbing to the top of the mountain, most of the boys want to turn back, afraid the beast might be there. Only Ralph, Jack, and Roger continue up, Jack and Ralph goading one another to continue. When Jack creeps ahead, he returns to say he saw something up there. When they all three climb up, the wind lifts the head of the downed pilot so that they can see his ruined face, causing them all to flee in the darkness.
Chapters 6-7 Analysis
At the end of Chapter 5, Ralph and Piggy wish for a sign from the adults. The sign comes in Chapter 6 in the form of an airplane battle high above the island, but they don’t see it. Had they, the battle would have told them the war is still going on. They’ve convinced themselves the adults would know what to do. Piggy in particular believes that the adults could fix everything: “They’d meet and have tea and discuss. Then things ‘ud be all right—” (94). However, the battle indicates that things would not be all right.The adults have just as hard a time as the children at getting alongsince the world of the adults has exploded into war.
The downed pilot is also a reminder of Simon’s words that perhaps the beast is them. In the darkness, the children can’t make out the pilot’s face, nor even tell what he is, so their fears make him into a monster, in the same way they’ve made each other into monsters. Their fears have gotten the better of them. The pilot, even though dead, could have given them hope of rescue, but instead, their fears turn him into a monster, not a harbinger of hope. Had they seen him for what he is, they might have thought how close his plane must have been, how close ships might have been, how close they were to someone—even a world at war—and know that they were not entirely alone on the island.
While searching for the beast, Ralph and Jack’s fears get the better of them as well. The chasm between them continues to grow. The only reason they go up the mountain together is out of fear that they will be seen as cowards if they don’t. Their different visions of how to run things has caused the divide in loyalty. Jack wants to hunt the beast; Ralph wants the fire relit. Both of them think they are protecting the children as well as themselves, but the different means they have chosen—Ralph wanting rescue, and Jack wanting to kill for their safety—sets them at odds with another. They’ve chosen different methods to govern, and those methods inevitably force them to confront one another instead of working together.
