Lord of the Flies: Imagery 8 key examples

The wood "yielded passionately" as if it enjoys being burned up. In this moment, nature works with the boys, and personifying the wood in this way makes it seem as if even the firewood wants them to succeed. For the boys and the reader alike, this is a moment of hope—they have made a fire, long considered crucial to the start of civilization.

"Yellow flames [...] poured upwards and shook a great beard of flame": this first descriptive image of fire (readers will encounter many more over the course of the novel) allows the reader to better imagine the blaze. Golding uses the unusual description "poured upwards" to describe the fire's raging—later, he metaphorically says the "breeze was a river of sparks." Both times, fire is like a liquid, and this elemental inversion plays into the strange setting the boys find themselves in.

The heat is described as "like a blow," as if the heat is punching the boys. This is a violent simile Golding reuses later to describe the midday heat on the island. Heat, both literal and figurative (in the sense of passion, hotheadedness), is prominent in this novel and often has violent results.

Remember that this first fire burns out because it gets too big for the boys to maintain it. These literary devices describe the strength and fury of the fire, which will cause it to use up the wood too quickly. Although the boys are amazed at the power of their first fire, it is this power that causes it to fail—much as Jack's power seems to get ahead of him.

Golding's descriptions of the island, like this one, are full of imagery that makes it easier for the reader to imagine the island and understand the awe, confusion, and isolation the boys feel. These strange mirages add to the weird, uncertain mood of the island, especially because the boys (except Piggy) don't know why they occur. The "snapping sharks" and personified sun that, in a simile, "gazed down like an angry eye" add lurking danger to the natural landscape. 

The imagery of the mirages is immediate; in other words, Golding has written it intentionally as close to the boys' viewpoints as possible, without explaining the scientific processes or even saying "the boys saw" or "thought they saw." Instead, he writes: "The coral reef [...] would quiver, be plucked apart." Even though the ocean floating up and reef getting torn apart is physically impossible, Golding describes it as if it is really happening, which brings the reader much closer to the boys' uninformed experience of the island. Piggy is the only one who has an idea of what's going on, and his claim about mirages, while correct, is set apart from the actual description.

Several similes allow Golding to build a thorough and evocative image of the mirages. Palms appear to "run like raindrops on a wire or be repeated as in an odd succession of mirrors." Land floats in the air "like a bubble." Writing a description of a mirage without saying the word "mirage" until later is quite difficult! Golding's excellent similes allow him to create imagery so that the reader can visualize these optical illusions.

The phrase "the slow swing from dawn to quick dusk" is a metaphor for the movement of the day. The "slow swing" suggests a gentle rocking motion, appropriate for the life of leisure, play, and napping that the narrator describes the boys enjoying. Their enjoyment is a bodily one, and Golding's imagery and metaphors allow the reader to imagine the sensual pleasures of the island, which include the "bright sun," "sweet air," and "floods of light." One excellent metaphor says the island looks "smoothed in pearl and opalescence" during midday—the sun makes the island look like a jewel. Finally, "the heat […] became a blow that they ducked." In this descriptive metaphor, the heat is like a punch. This metaphor helps readers comprehend the oppressive heat, which is both literally dangerous to the boys and figuratively representative of the hotheadedness and passion which overtakes the characters during the novel, leading to violence and death. Once again, although the description of the island here is beautiful, a strain of dread underlies the natural paradise.

Golding's descriptions of the ocean use personification, simile, and metaphor to create the image of a massive, sleeping (for now) monster. The ocean looks like a massive creature breathing; it is a "leviathan." This characterization adds to the reader's sense of dread, and it gives readers a sense of what Ralph sees when he looks out at the water separating him from his home: the ocean seems an insurmountable obstacle.

The water is "whispering like the wind among the heads of the forest." Just as Golding compares fire to water, now water is compared to another natural element: wind. The boys are surrounded by the natural, which seems to operate by mysterious principles and, even worse, cannot be totally controlled by humans. Fire, water, wind, and other forces of the natural environment are strong and unmerciful.

Again, note Golding's careful and evocative descriptions of the natural environment. He supports his imagery with similes and metaphors: for instance, the rocks are "spread like a table" and "seem like cliffs." Repeated returns to the island's natural scenery are both beautiful and worrying—as Golding describes it, danger lurks under every piece of the island landscape.

Since the book starts after the boys have crash-landed on the island, and since it proceeds chronologically, flashbacks are the only way the reader can see Ralph's past through his own eyes. Ralph's memories of home, even when they are not as detailed as this one, humanize him and make the reader pity him. We also get small details about Ralph's former life, which is so different from his life on the island as to be shocking. Although we don't know everything about Ralph and his family, we do learn that his father didn't always "come home every day," and that his mother either left or died. 

This flashback is written in a different style from the rest of the novel. Note the shifts between second person pronoun "you" and third person pronoun "he." The rest of the book is narrated in the third person, but this slip into the second person destabilizes the memory and makes it dreamlike. In this stream of consciousness moment, rather than recalling a specific event, Ralph lists unconnected associations and images of objects. 

This meditative moment evokes Jesus fasting in the desert for 40 days. Despite his thirst and his discomfort with the sun, Simon does not move. What is he waiting for? This moment of suffering and waiting is something many figures in the Bible undergo, including and especially Jesus. Simon kneels as if in prayer. Even if the novel is not explicitly Christian, Golding seems to use Jesus as a model for Simon's character.

The metaphor "arrow of the sun" suggests indicating Simon is receiving divine guidance or seeking it. The sun often represents a deity, and in this novel the sun and heat are often painful. This is once again true here, where the heat is explicitly described as uncomfortable and also metaphorically called an "arrow." In a Christian understanding, being close to God does not mean one's life will be free of suffering; in fact, quite the opposite often occurs, not only in the story of Jesus's crucifixion, but also with Christian martyrs. Simon's position as a Christlike figure in the book does not only depend on his spiritual awareness and wisdom, but also his suffering, unique exposure to death (when he frees the parachutist's corpse), and eventual "sacrifice," when the boys kill him.

There is a lot of personification here, some of it seemingly contradictory. Notice that Simon feels sorry for the corpse: "He saw how pitilessly the layers of rubber and canvas held together the poor body." The personified parachute is pitiless; the body is disrespected by this situation. Simon approaches this dead body.

However, then "the figure lifted, bowed, and breathed foully at him." The personified corpse seems to have taken on a life of its own when it is lifted by the wind. Despite Simon's pity for it, it is still monstrous and "breathed foully," a metaphor for the rotting smell it makes when the wind blows toward him. However, Simon eventually "freed [...] the figure from the wind's indignity." Simon overcomes fear and disgust to lay the body to rest, and the phrase "the wind's indignity" illustrates how important this action is both for Simon and for Golding. The wind, a natural force, is personified into something that can inflict indignity on people, and Simon, as a human, has the power to right this wrong.

The pig skull is personified into a creepy, ghostly figure that seems to grin at Ralph evilly. He can't tell whether it's "lifeless." It seems to know secrets—perhaps the secrets it told Simon—but Ralph doesn't have a dialogue with the skull like Simon did. The skull's menacing personification connects the more grounded Ralph to Simon's esoteric experiences. It likely goes without saying, but the skull is a vivid and frightening image that effectively adds suspense and fear in the final chapter of the novel.

As before, personification makes the natural environment seem alive and knowing here: this is not only true for the grinning skull, but for the "inquisitive ant" as well. In a simile, the skull's color is also compared to the conch. By drawing a line between the now-shattered shell that represented civilization and the pig's skull, what is Golding trying to illustrate? Reasonable minds may differ on the precise interpretation, but perhaps what we should note is that the skull has replaced the conch—in which case fear and violence have replaced civilized order on the island. Just as Roger broke the conch by killing Piggy earlier, Ralph now breaks the skull by punching it. Roger rejected civilization, and Ralph rejects fear and violence.