Two Tendencies in British Literature after World War II: Postmodernism and Realism, satire, social comedy.
British Postmodernist Literature. The Problems of Morality, Art and Truth in the Philosophical Novel and Drama.
Мета та завдання лекції: охарактеризувати особливості історичного
літературного процесу післявоєнного періоду, ознайомити студентів iз
провідними напрямками та провідними письменниками останнього, із
основними філософськими ідеями та художніми прийомами літератури
постмодернізму та їх реалізацією в творах видатних англійських
письменників другої половини ХХ століття.
Нова термінологія: postmodernism, pastiche, fictionality, “angry young men”, the genre of the humorous campus novel, an anti-cosmopolitan streak, existentialism, intertextuality, a foregrounding of fictionality, the theatre of the absurd.
План лекції:
1. The historical background. Main streams in Post-War English literature.
2. Main characteristics of the Postmodernism in literature
3. A. The 1950s group of writers labeled as “ angry young men ”, who combined a relist portrayal of provincial communities with a strong sense of social injustice.
B. John Osborne’s play “Look Back in Anger” (1956) that captured a mood of disillusion in the period.
C. Kingsley Amis’s “Lucky Jim” (1954) comic satire that inaugurated the genre of the humorous campus novel. Since then it was developed by M. Bradbury in “The History Man” (1975), and David Lodge in “Changing Places” (1975) and “Small World” (1984).
D. The novels such as John Braine’s “Room at the Top” (1957), John Wain’s “Hurry on Down” (1953), Sten Barstow’s “A Kind of Loving” (1960) and Alan Sillitoe’s “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” (1958) conveyed a post-war sense of futility, discontent and rebellion.
E. The Movement poet Philip Larkin – skeptical, poignant and witty, one of the best English poets of the second half of the 20th century. “The Whitsun Weddings” (1964) and “High Windows” (1974).
4. Iris Murdoch (1919 – 1999) – the author of tragic-comic novels with philosophical and artistic concerns: “Under the Net” (1954), “The Bell” (1958), “The Black Prince”, “The Sea, the Sea” (1978) and “The Good Apprentice” (1985).
5. The sense of life as a battle of good and evil in the parables of William Golding (1911 – 1993): “Lord of the Flies” (1954) and “The Inheritors” (1955).
6. John Fowles (1926 – 2006), an experimental writer interested in the power of repressive convention and social conformity, the enigmatic nature of sexual relations, the desire to manipulate and control, and the problem of individual freedom. The above themes are tackled by the author in the novels: “The Collector” (1963), “The Magus” (1965/ 1977), “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” (1969) and in the volume of short stories “The Ebony Tower” (1974).
7. One of the best-known works of Muriel Spark (1918 – 2004) – “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1961) is a combination of the comic and the sinister in the novel that deals with the influence over a group of schoolgirls of a progressive spinster school teacher in Edinburgh.
8. S. Beckett’s play “Waiting for Godot” (1962) as a major influence on modern British Drama.
THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The history of Britain in the post-war period is undoubtedly a history of decline. In the last fifty years Britain has tried to maintain a leading role in the world, based on its heroic defense of democracy in World War II and its links with the Commonwealth countries, the ex-colonies of the now lost British Empire. Yet a succession of economic crises, the predominance of the USA and its "Cold War" politics, and the Franco-German project of a United Europe have forced Britain to partly abandon its pretenses to world leadership. Arguably, Britain now occupies an uncomfortable secondary position among the world's nations, under the powerful shadow of its former colony, the USA, and lacking a firm pro-European stance.
The history of the post-war novel in English, and also that of drama and poetry, cannot be understood without reference to the coexistence in the first half of the twentieth century of Modernism and the more traditional approaches to literature inherited from the Victorian period. The Modernist writers reacted against realism in fiction and the remains of Romantic sentimentalism in poetry by introducing technical innovations that could be used to look at reality from the point of view of the irrational, the subconscious, the anti-sentimental, or the highly individualistic. In drama, the revolution followed other lines, with G. B. Shaw's introduction to the English stage of the naturalistic drama developed by Ibsen. Modernism can be said to enter the English stage precisely at the time of Shaw's death in 1950, when Samuel Beckett's plays challenged the hegemony of naturalism and the artificial, well-made play.
After 1945, when novelists faced the task of explaining the new historical reality and the position of the individual in the new post-war order, most realized that this entailed making a choice between traditional literary models that seemed more suitable for transmitting an accurate portrait of the individual in a changing society, and experimental, Modernist models that seemed more suitable for explaining the disjunction between the individual consciousness and the problematic flow of contemporary history. Post-modernism was born out of this dilemma.
Post-modernism can thus be said to be a new cultural atmosphere in which the writer is inevitably aware of this open choice between tradition and experimentalism, rather than a continuation of Modernism or a reaction against it. Post-war novelists cannot escape the shadow of either Modernism or Victorianism and must accommodate both in their work. Some have produced a new synthesis –which is what is really characteristic of post-modernism – while others have openly acknowledged their allegiance to either literary tradition or experimentation.
As far as the post-war novel is concerned, the post-modernist synthesis was relatively slow to come, if it came at all, for there seemed to be a need to first define the new contours of social reality after the war before resuming the project of Modernism.
Traditionalism: between the past and the present
In the period between 1945 and 1955, a nostalgic look at the lost pre-war past was combined with a look at the new reality faced by the generation growing up in the 1940s, often in provincial surroundings.
Novels such as Evelyn Waugh's “Brideshead Revisited” (1945) and L.P. Hartley's “The Go-Between” (1953) analyze the present by looking backwards, searching for the flaws that cause the desolation of the individual speaking in the present. This return to a personal past shows, above all, why innocence has been the main casualty of war, and suggests that despite its apparent placidity, the best
that the pre-war world could offer in social terms was inherently corrupt. The idea that civilization contains the seeds of corruption is perhaps best expressed in William Golding's “Lord of the Flies” (1954). In this novel Golding does not examine a particular moment of the recent past, but childhood, as the site where adult civilized values are implanted, only to find there sheer brutality.
The early 1950s brought a new interest in the present, possibly as a reaction against the nostalgic backward look at an essentially phoney world from which many – above all, the lower middle and working classes – were excluded. Leaving aside the beginnings of the post-colonial novel, what happened in the 1950s novel is that the margins of culture moved to the centre, expressing a generalized discontent, which was paralleled in the plays of the Angry Young Men and some of the poetry of The Movement. At the time, this discontent was defined as political discontent, but it would seem now, rather, to be lower middle-class frustration at being denied a place in the vanished world of the upper classes portrayed by pre-war Literature.
The " Angry young men " were a group of mostly working and middle class British playwrights and novelists who became prominent in the 1950s. The group's leading members included John Osborne and Kingsley Amis. The phrase was originally coined by the Royal Court Theatre's press officer to promote John Osborne's 1956 play “ Look Back in Anger”. It is thought to be derived from the autobiography of Leslie Paul, founder of the Woodcraft Folk, whose “ Angry Young Man” was published in 1951.
Following the success of the Osborne play, the label " angry young men " was later applied by British media to describe young writers who were characterized by a disillusionment with traditional British society. The term, always imprecise, began to have less meaning over the years as the writers to whom it was originally applied became more divergent, and many of them dismissed the label as useless.
Thanks to the new educational opportunities opened up by post-war Labour
governments, new lower middle-class and working class writers, who often came from places other than London, found themselves in a cultural world in which they were simultaneously strangers and also the rising new stars. William Cooper's “Scenes from Provincial Life” (1950) was the mirror in which the new writers found an appropriate model to narrate the discontent of the post-war generation. Novels such as Kingsley Amis's “Lucky Jim” (1954), John Waine's “Hurry on Down” (1953), John Braine's “Room at the Top” (1957), Allan Sillitoe's “Saturday Night, Sunday Morning” (1958), Keith Waterhouse's “Billy Liar” (1958), or David Storey's “This Sporting Life” (1960), dramatize the position of the individual who is aware of the new chances for upward social mobility and who either benefits from them – hence Jim's luck– or sees them slip from his grasp, whether by choice or because the social structure still too rigid.
The period 1945-1960 also saw the entrance of fantasy into the English novel on a large scale. The novels of these years preceded the new wave of fantasy writers in the 1960s, including J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, who questioned the boundaries between fantasy and the mainstream or realistic novel.
Orwell's political dystopian fantasies, “Animal Farm” (1945) and “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (1949), Mervyn Peake's Gothic “Gormenghast” trilogy (“Titus Groan”, 1946; “Gormenghast”, 1950; and “Titus Alone”, 1959), John Wyndham's science-fiction novel “The Day of the Triffids” (1951) and J.R.R. Tolkien 's trilogy “The Lord of the Rings” (“The Fellowship of the Ring”, 1954; “The Two Towers”, 1954; and “The Return of the King”, 1955) exemplify this trend.
Orwell's use of fantasy suggests that far from being escapist, fantasy can be a way of expressing the anxieties caused by history in an alternative way. Peake himself drew the inspiration for his bizarre gallery of characters in Gormenghast from the horror of the Belsen concentration camp, which he had visited.
The idea of the long chronicle criss-crosses fantasy and realism in the novel, for the trilogy and other even longer sequences, now typical only of fantasy, were the format chosen by, among others, Anthony Powell (“The Music of Time”, 1951-75, 12 volumes), C.P. Snow (“Strangers and Brothers”, 1940-70, 11volumes), Olivia Manning (“The Balkan Trilogy”, 1960-62), Paul Scott (“The Raj Quartet”, 1966-75, 4 volumes) and Lawrence Durrell to narrate contemporary life. Durrell's “Alexandria Quartet” (“Justine”, 1957; “Balthazar”, 1958; “Mountolive”, 1959; and “Clea”, 1960) and his “Avinyon Quintet” (1974-85) question the very idea of the chronicle by returning repeatedly to the same events, which are narrated in each volume from the point of view of a different character.
Reality, Durrell suggests, cannot be apprehended from a single point of view and is necessarily mediated by the consciousness through which it is filtered – a point that had already been made by the Modernists.
As Durrell's work shows, the experimentalism derived from Modernism found a new vein in the novel of the late 1950s, especially in the novels of Samuel Beckett and Nigel Dennis.
Experimentalism greatly expanded in the 1960s and 1970s without, however, displacing the work of realists such as Graham Greene from its position of pre-eminence. At what precise moment the Modernist experiments in technique became post-modernist is a matter of dispute. Writers such as Henry Green, Lawrence Durrell and Wyndham Lewis seem to bridge the gap between the two periods, whereas others alternate realism with experimentalism.
Anthony Burgess's “The Clockwork Orange” (1962), Doris Lessing's “The Golden Notebook” (1962) and John Fowles's “The French Lieutenant's Woman” (1969) are outstanding novels outside the realistic framework, but they were written nonetheless by novelists who were also proficient in the writing of more traditional realistic novels.
A number of novelists heavily influenced by the French "nouveau roman" – Andrew Sinclair, Julian Mitchell, Christine Brooke-Rose, John Berger – chose experimentalism rather than realism in the 1960s and 1970s.
2. “Postmodernism ” has been a notoriously difficult term to define, and it has had a complicated history across various disciplines. Nevertheless, the idea largely emerged in the late 1950s in the humanities to indicate a sense that modernism had been superseded by a new cultural, aesthetic, and critical agenda. Some theorists have treated “postmodernism” as an epochal or historical term, while others have regarded it as an aesthetic or formal characteristic that is not limited to a particular era. Initially, it found its principal purchase in cultural philosophy, literature, architecture, art, and cultural theory, but it has subsequently affected and influenced debates across a wide range of disciplines, including international politics, psychology, law, history, sociology, and even town planning and medicine.
Postmodern literature is a form of literature which is marked, both stylistically and ideologically, by a reliance on such literary conventions as fragmentation, paradox, unreliable narrators, often unrealistic and downright impossible plots, games, parody, paranoia, dark humor and authorial self-reference.
Postmodern authors tend to reject outright meanings in their novels, stories and poems, and, instead, highlight and celebrate the possibility of multiple meanings, or a complete lack of meaning, within a single literary work.
Postmodern literature also often rejects the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' forms of art and literature, as well as the distinctions between different genres and forms of writing and storytelling. Here are some examples of stylistic techniques that are often used in postmodern literature:
Irony, playfulness, black humor: Postmodern authors were certainly not the first to use irony and humor in their writing, but for many postmodern authors, these became the hallmarks of their style. Postmodern authors will often treat very serious subjects – World War II, the Cold War, conspiracy theories – from a position of distance and disconnect, and will choose to depict their histories ironically and humorously.
Pastiche: The taking of various ideas from previous writings and literary styles and pasting them together to make new styles. Many postmodern authors combined, or “pasted” elements of previous genres and styles of literature to create a new narrative voice, or to comment on the writing of their contemporaries. Thomas Pynchon, one of the most important postmodern authors, uses elements from detective fiction, science fiction, and war fiction, songs, pop culture references, and well-known, obscure, and fictional history.
Intertextuality: The acknowledgment of previous literary works within another literary work. The intertextuality of certain works of postmodern fiction, the dependence on literature that has been created earlier, attempts to comment on the situation in which both literature and society found themselves in the second half of the 20th century: living, working, and creating on the backs of those that had come before.
Metafiction: The act of writing about writing or making readers aware of the fictional nature of the very fiction they're reading. Many postmodern authors feature metafiction in their writing, which, essentially, is writing about writing, an attempt to make the reader aware of its fictionality, and, sometimes, the presence of the author. Authors sometimes use this technique to allow for flagrant shifts in narrative, impossible jumps in time, or to maintain emotional distance as a narrator.
Historiographic metafiction
The term was created by Linda Hutcheon to refer to novels that fictionalize actual historical events and characters: Thomas Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon, for example, features a scene in which George Washington smokes pot.
Temporal Distortion: The use of non-linear timelines and narrative techniques in a story. Temporal distortion is a literary technique that uses a nonlinear timeline; the author may jump forwards or backwards in time, or there may be cultural and historical references that do not fit: Abraham Lincoln uses a telephone in Ishmael Reed’s “Flight to Canada”. This technique is frequently used in literature, but it has become even more common in films.
Minimalism: The use of characters and events which are decidedly common and non-exceptional characters.
Maximalism: Disorganized, lengthy, highly detailed writing. Villified by its critics for being in turns disorganized, sprawling, overly long, and emotionally disconnected, maximalism exists in the tradition of long works like The Odyssey. Authors that use this technique will sometimes defend their work as being as long as it needs to be, depending on the subject material that is covered.
Magical Realism: The introduction of impossible or unrealistic events into a narrative that is otherwise realistic. Magical realist novels may include dreams taking place during normal life, the return of previously deceased characters, extremely complicated plots, wild shifts in time, and myths and fairy tales becoming part of the narrative. Many critics argue that magical realism has its roots in the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, two South American writers, and some have classified it as a Latin American style.
Paranoia
Many postmodern authors write under the assumption that modern society cannot be explained or understood. From that point of view, any apparent connections or controlling influences on the chaos of society would be very frightening, and this lends a sense of paranoia to many postmodern works.
Faction: The mixing of actual historical events with fictional events without clearly defining what is factual and what is fictional. Faction is very similar to historiographic metafiction, in that its subject material is based on actual events, but writers of faction tend to blur the line between fact and fiction to the degree that it is almost impossible to know the difference between the two, as opposed to metafiction, which often draws attention to the fact that it is not true.
Reader Involvement: Often through direct address to the reader and the open acknowledgment of the fictional nature of the events being described. Many postmodern authors, as a response to modernism, which frequently set its authors apart from their readers, attempt to involve the reader as much as possible over the course of a novel. This can take the form of asking the reader questions, including unwritten narratives that must be constructed by the reader, or allowing the reader to make decisions regarding the course of the narrative.
Many critics and scholars find it best to define postmodern literature against the popular literary style that came before it: modernism. In many ways, postmodern literary styles and ideas serve to dispute, reverse, mock and reject the principles of modernist literature.
For example, instead of following the standard modernist literary quest for meaning in a chaotic world, postmodern literature tends to eschew, often playfully, the very possibility of meaning. The postmodern novel, story or poem is often presented as a parody of the modernist literary quest for meaning. Thomas Pynchon's postmodern novel The Crying of Lot 49 is a perfect example of this. In this novel, the protagonist's quest for knowledge and understanding results ultimately in confusion and the lack of any sort of clear understanding of the events that transpired.
Postmodern Philosophy
Postmodern literary writers have also been greatly influenced by various movements and ideas taken from postmodern philosophy. Postmodern philosophy tends to conceptualize the world as being impossible to strictly define or understand. Postmodern philosophy argues that knowledge and facts are always relative to particular situations and that it's both futile and impossible to attempt to locate any precise meaning to any idea, concept or event (existentialism).
Postmodern philosophy tends to renounce the possibility of 'grand narratives' and, instead, argues that all belief systems and ideologies are developed for the express purpose of controlling others and maintaining particular political and social systems. The postmodern philosophical perspective is pretty cynical and takes nothing that is presented at face value or as being legitimate.
Similarly, at the core of many postmodern literary writer's imaginations is a belief that the world has already fallen apart and that actual, singular meaning is impossible to locate (if it can be said to exist at all), and that literature, instead, should serve to reveal the world's absurdities, countless paradoxes and ironies.
Iris Murdoch
Dame Iris Murdoch, original name in full Jean Iris Murdoch, married name Mrs. John O. Bayley (born July 15, 1919, Dublin, Ireland—died February 8, 1999, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England) British novelist and philosopher noted for her psychological novels that contain philosophical and comic elements.
After an early childhood spent in London, Murdoch went to Badminton School, Bristol, and from 1938 to 1942 studied at Somerville College, Oxford. Between 1942 and 1944 she worked in the British Treasury and then for two years as an administrative officer with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. In 1948 she was elected a fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford.
Murdoch’s first published work was a critical study, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953). This was followed by two novels, Under the Net (1954) and The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), that were admired for their intelligence, wit, and high seriousness. These qualities, along with a rich comic sense and a gift for analyzing the tensions and complexities in sophisticated sexual relationships, continued to distinguish her work. With what is perhaps her finest book, The Bell (1958), Murdoch began to attain wide recognition as a novelist. She went on to a highly prolific career with such novels as A Severed Head (1961), The Red and the Green (1965), The Nice and the Good (1968), The Black Prince (1973), Henry and Cato (1976), The Sea, the Sea (1978, Booker Prize), The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), The Good Apprentice (1985), The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), The Message to the Planet (1989), and The Green Knight (1993). Murdoch’s last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), was not well received; some critics attributed the novel’s flaws to the Alzheimer’s disease with which she had been diagnosed in 1994. Murdoch’s husband, the novelist John Bayley, chronicled her struggle with the disease in his memoir, Elegy for Iris (1999). A selection of her voluminous correspondence was published as Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934–1995 (2016).
Murdoch’s novels typically have convoluted plots in which innumerable characters representing different philosophical positions undergo kaleidoscopic changes in their relations with each other. Realistic observations of 20th-century life among middle-class professionals are interwoven with extraordinary incidents that partake of the macabre, the grotesque, and the wildly comic. The novels illustrate Murdoch’s conviction that although human beings think they are free to exercise rational control over their lives and behaviour, they are actually at the mercy of the unconscious mind, the determining effects of society at large, and other, more inhuman, forces. In addition to producing novels, Murdoch wrote plays, verse, and works of philosophy and literary criticism.
Review of the novel “ Under the Net “ (it was Iris Murdoch's first novel). It is narrated by James (Jake) Donaghue. In describing himself he admits:
“… I am something over thirty and talented, but lazy. I live by literary hack-work, and a little original writing, as little as possible ”.
At the beginning of the novel Jake (and his mate Finn) find themselves in need of new digs. Magdalen – Madge, who they have been staying with, turns them out, having apparently gotten herself engaged to Sacred Sammy Starfield, "the diamond bookmaker".
Jake is a cheerful, happy-go-lucky sort of fellow. He does just what needs to be done for him to get by. Money isn't a great priority for him – and he manages to scrape by, even though he seems terminally short of cash. (Money – and its absence – is central to the novel: Jake and his friends are constantly scrounging around for just enough to buy another drink or hire a taxi (for a person with limited funds at his disposal Jake takes taxis with alarming frequency); it is also a facet of the novel that quickly wears thin.)
Jake doesn't need much: his first night he wraps himself up comfortably in a "bearskin complete with snout and claws". Still, he does look for some place more suitable to bunk down. A former lover, Anna, isn't much help, but her sister Sadie wouldn't mind him around the house.
Sadie leads Jake to another old acquaintance: Hugo Belfounder, a curious and very talented soul who dabbled (successfully) in a variety of undertakings. Hugo and Jake used to have grand philosophical discussions, and Jake used this material in one of his books; out of embarrassment Jake cut his ties with Hugo, but now their paths cross again.
Things get complicated: Jake wins some money at the races (courtesy of Sacred Sammy), one of Jake's manuscripts goes missing (and it seems there is some interest in making a film of the material), Jake kidnaps a famous dog (as part of his plot to get the manuscript back), and the French hack Jake has been translating all these years goes out and writes a book that wins him the Prix Goncourt. All the while Jake rushes to and fro and all about (including, briefly, to Paris), getting involved in a number of capers and some madcap misadventures. Politics gets in the way of things too, and there is a spectacular scene at a movie studio. Love – as always – complicates things too; it is not a book about happy relationships.
It is all in good fun, but also a bit too manic. And Jake is a bit too unsettled (becoming, at one point, a hospital orderly). Things comes to a reasonable conclusion, but it's all a bit much for such a slim volume.
Murdoch does write well, though. Some of the scenes are hilarious – and the brief philosophical excursions are also very good. Hugo's philosophy has a bit of Wittgenstein to it (and the character, too, is in some – though not all – ways Wittgensteinian). Communication, he feels, is practically impossible: "The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods". And he tells the flighty Jake: "All theorizing is flight".
Anna echoes some of Hugo's words early on (before Jake can make the connection), and the ideas are well integrated into the story as a whole -- but not quite well enough. (Of course, one tends to measure Murdoch against her own great achievements in her later books, brimming with ideas, neatly tied to their stories: a high standard to measure up to.)
In the end Hugo has philosophically accepted: "One must just blunder on. Truth lies in blundering on." Murdoch's first effort here is a fine example of such blundering on – but she perhaps remained too wary of trying harder to get close enough to "crawl under the net".
"I know that nothing consoles and nothing justifies except a story", Jake quotes from his own Hugo-influenced work, The Silencer. The ideas are already here, and the talent too, but Murdoch wasn't fully able to make a story out of it yet.
4. William Golding “Lord of the flies”
When “ Lord of the Flies” opens, a plane carrying a group of British boys ages 6 to 12 has crashed on a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean. (Also, apparently the world is at war. This matters.) With no adults around, the boys are left to fend for and govern themselves. Things start out okay. The boys use a conch shell as a talking stick, and Ralph, one of the older boys, becomes "chief."
And then trouble begins. They're afraid of a "beast" somewhere on the island, and then they decide to build a signal fire using the glasses of a boy named Piggy (who is a portly fellow, and also the most loyal friend to Ralph). But Jack, jealous of Ralph's power, decides the boys should devote their energies to hunting food (namely pigs) instead of maintaining the fire. The longer they're on the island, the more savage he becomes. Meanwhile, other key player, a wise and philosophical boy named Simon, works with Ralph to build shelters.
Eventually these latent conflicts become not so latent, and the boys who are supposed to be tending the fire skip out on their duties to kill a pig. The blood and gore of the hunt is all very exciting until they realize that, while they were out being bloodthirsty boys, the fire went out and a ship passed by without noticing them. Jack has also managed to punch Piggy in the face and break one lens of his glasses.
Right about this time a dead man attached to a parachute blows to the island. The mysterious parachuting creature is mistaken for the beast, and the boys begin a massive hunt to kill it. Only Simon is skeptical, believing instead they're really just afraid of themselves. He goes off into the woods to contemplate the situation while Jack and Ralph ascend the mountain and find the beast – but don't stick around long enough to see that it is in fact only a dead man.
Back in the group, Jack decides Ralph shouldn't be chief anymore. He secedes and invites whoever wants to come with him and kill things (like more pigs, and maybe some people if they feel like it). Most of the older kids go with him, and Simon, hiding, watches Jack and Co. hunt a pig. This time, they slaughter a fat mother pig (in a scene described somewhat as a rape), cut off her head, and jam it onto a stick in the ground.
Simon stares at the head, which he calls "the Lord of the Flies" as it tells him (he's hallucinating, by the way) that it is the beast and that it is part of him (Simon). Simon passes out, gets a bloody nose, and wakes up covered in sweat, blood, and other generally disgusting things. Despite all this, he decides to continue up the mountain to face the beast, i.e. dead guy. Then he vomits and staggers down the mountain.
By now, Ralph and Piggy (both rather ravenous) are attending (with all the other boys) a big feast/party that Jack (decorated like an idol) is throwing. It's all a frenzied reenactment of the pig hunt until Simon, still bloody, sweaty, and covered in puke, stumbles down into the center of the crazed boys. He tries to tell them about the beast, but he is unrecognizable and the boys jab at him with their spears until he's dead. Simon's body is washed out to sea that night, and the wind carries off the body of the dead parachuting man, while Ralph and Piggy convince themselves they didn't take part in murdering Simon.
It's all downhill from here. Jack's crew attacks Ralph and Piggy and steals Piggy's eyeglasses to make fire on their own. When Ralph and Piggy decide to calmly talk it out with the "savages," Roger pushes a huge boulder off a cliff, killing Piggy. Ralph ends up running for his life, finds out that there's a head-on-stick future planned for him, and at last makes it to the shore of the island where he runs into… an officer of the British Navy. The boys are rescued from their mock war, but we're left with the image of the Navy's "trim cruiser" from the real war of the adults.
