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Setting
Definition of Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like" or "as," but can also... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often... read full definition
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—Skull-Like:
Early in Chapter 1, Golding uses personification, simile, and foreshadowing to describe Ralph's exploration of the island:
Then he leapt back on the terrace, pulled off his shirt, and stood there among the skull-like coconuts with green shadows from the palms and the forest sliding over his skin.
Although it is a small moment, notice that the coconuts are described as "skull-like." This is an excellent bit of foreshadowing and mood-setting. Readers will see more skulls later in the novel: the pig skull and the parachutist's corpse. The description of the coconuts as skull-like foreshadows the violent events of the novel. Even the natural wildlife of the island is similar to death, and this imagery makes the island creepy even before the reader understands the plot. This is a great example of how Golding sets a pessimistic, dreadful tone throughout the novel.
Note as well that the personified forest is "sliding over" Ralph's skin, as if the woods are alive and trying to touch or absorb him. The boys' savagery can be understood as their absorption into a primitive lifestyle ruled by nature. Golding personifies natural elements such as the forest to emphasize the power of nature, and to make the island seem strange, wild, and autonomous—almost as if it has a mind of its own.
Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Forest Fire:
During Chapter 2, after discovering Piggy's glasses can be used to spark a flame, the boys accidentally set a forest fire. The passage makes heavy use of figurative language:
One patch touched a tree trunk and scrambled up like a bright squirrel. The smoke increased, sifted, rolled outwards. The squirrel leapt on the wings of the wind and clung to another standing tree, eating downwards. Beneath the dark canopy of leaves and smoke the fire laid hold on the forest and began to gnaw. Acres of black and yellow smoke rolled steadily toward the sea. […] The flames, as though they were a kind of wild life, crept as a jaguar creeps on its belly toward a line of birch-like saplings that fledged an outcrop of the pink rock. They flapped at the first of the trees, and the branches grew a brief foliage of fire. The heart of flame leapt nimbly across the gap between the trees and then went swinging and flaring along the whole row of them.
First the fire is like a squirrel (simile), then it simply is one (metaphor). The flames are all sorts of "wild life": not only squirrels, but also jaguars. These metaphors indicate the fire's speed and ease of spreading. They also provide visceral imagery of the out-of-control fire. For much the same purposes, the fire is personified: the flames "leapt nimbly" and then "went swinging and flaring." Fire "began to gnaw" at the forest. This personification attributes hunger and excited destruction to fire. Just as the boys later become excited to cause destruction, seemingly without pausing to think about the consequences of their actions, so too does the fire here playfully and happily ruin a patch of jungle.
This early forest fire foreshadows the final events of the novel. In chapter 12, Jack's tribe sets fire to part of the forest to try to flush out Ralph.
Now the fire was nearer; those volleying shots were great limbs, trunks even, bursting. The fools! The fools! The fire must be almost at the fruit trees—what would they eat tomorrow?
Ralph hears a sound like "volleying shots," as if the fire is shooting at him, but it's instead the sound of wood splintering because of the fast-burning fire. Remember the playful yet destructive personification of the fire earlier? Now we see the consequences of that kind of "savage" behavior—the fire may kill Ralph today, but Jack and his tribe will have nothing to eat tomorrow. Again, savagery and hotheadedness work against civilization and life.
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Explanation and Analysis—Great Beard of Flame:
In chapter two, the boys successfully make a fire for the first time, and several literary devices are used to describe it:
The pile was so rotten, and now so tinder-dry, that whole limbs yielded passionately to the yellow flames that poured upwards and shook a great beard of flame twenty feet in the air. For yards round the fire the heat was like a blow, and the breeze was a river of sparks. Trunks crumbled to white dust.
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.
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Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—Jack the Hunter:
In Chapter 3, Jack tries to track down pigs to hunt, and the narrator uses similes to describe the action:
Jack was bent double. He was down like a sprinter, his nose only a few inches from the humid earth. The tree trunks and the creepers that festooned them lost themselves in a green dusk thirty feet above him, and all about was the undergrowth. There was only the faintest indication of a trail here; a cracked twig and what might be the impression of one side of a hoof. He lowered his chin and stared at the traces as though he would force them to speak to him. Then dog-like, uncomfortably on all fours yet unheeding his discomfort, he stole forward five yards and stopped.
This series of similes first compares Jack to a sprinter. The second tells us that Jack stares as if he would force the hoofprints to reveal where the pig had gone. Finally, the paragraph compares him to a dog, complete with the image of the boy on all fours. These similes do a lot of quick, subtle characterization of Jack.
The sprinter simile illustrates that Jack uses his athletic power and confidence to achieve his goals. He also sees the hunting (of both pigs and, later, the other boys) as a game or competition, and the sprinter comparison serves to emphasize this. Just as Jack interrupts, makes demands, and relies on force throughout the rest of the book, here he even tries to demand something of the hoofprints. Finally, he's compared to an animal, and specifically a dog. This scene shows that Jack adapts almost too well to the wilderness of the island—perhaps the island is making him more animalistic, like a hunting dog that tracks down prey without pausing to consider why.
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Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—A Long Satisfying Drink:
In Chapter 4, Jack and his hunters kill a pig instead of keeping the fire lit as Ralph had asked. As Ralph yells at Jack for abandoning his post, Jack doesn't listen. The passage uses both metaphor and simile:
His mind was crowded with memories; memories of the knowledge that had come to them when they closed in on the struggling pig, knowledge that they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.
Jack's mind is metaphorically "crowded with memories"—the visceral impressions of the pig hunt overshadow Ralph's anger. The final sentence contains the simile that best describes Jack's enjoyment of the hunt. It is not about getting meat, or even about the game of the hunt, but about a baser and more instinctive pleasure in killing. The simile that compares the pig's death to a "long satisfying drink" reveals that, at least for Jack and perhaps for the rest of the boys, the killing of the pig satisfied a bodily need. This foreshadows the deaths of Simon and Piggy, as well as Samneric's torture and the final chapter of the book, when Jack's tribe hunts Ralph. These cruel acts seem to tap into a latent instinct the boys have. Perhaps this moment, when Jack savors the pig's death "like a long satisfying drink," is when he and the other older boys begin to fall into savagery and prioritize their wants over the lives of others.
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Explanation and Analysis—Mirage:
In Chapter 4, a beautiful and weird description of the mirages the boys see on the island uses imagery and simile:
Strange things happened at midday. The glittering sea rose up, moved apart in planes of blatant impossibility; the coral reef and the few stunted palms that clung to the more elevated parts would float up into the sky, would quiver, be plucked apart, run like raindrops on a wire or be repeated as in an odd succession of mirrors. Sometimes land loomed where there was no land and flicked out like a bubble as the children watched. Piggy discounted all this learnedly as a “mirage” and since no boy could reach even the reef over the stretch of water where the snapping sharks waited, they grew accustomed to these mysteries and ignored them, just as they ignored the miraculous, throbbing stars. At midday the illusions merged into the sky and there the sun gazed down like an angry eye.
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.
Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—The Ocean Leviathan:
In Chapter 6, Ralph looks out at the ocean while exploring Castle Rock, and the narrator uses a variety of literary devices to describe it:
Now he saw the landsman’s view of the swell and it seemed like the breathing of some stupendous creature. Slowly the waters sank among the rocks, revealing pink tables of granite, strange growths of coral, polyp, and weed. Down, down, the waters went, whispering like the wind among the heads of the forest. There was one flat rock there, spread like a table, and the waters sucking down on the four weedy sides made them seem like cliffs. Then the sleeping leviathan breathed out, the waters rose, the weed streamed, and the water boiled over the table rock with a roar. There was no sense of the passage of waves; only this minute-long fall and rise and fall.
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.
Chapter 9
Explanation and Analysis—Authority:
In Chapter 9, during a feast that Jack uses to undermine Ralph's authority and sway boys to his tribe, Jack is described using metaphor, personification, and simile:
Power lay in the brown swell of his forearms: authority sat on his shoulder and chattered in his ear like an ape.
Power could literally "lay in the brown swell of [Jack's] forearms," since that swell is probably muscle, the source of his impressive athletic abilities. However, this phrase could also be understood metaphorically: Jack's commanding physical appearance and charisma do also give him power in situations such as these, where he has to convince the other boys to follow him. Recall how Piggy is bullied and ignored for looking and seeming weak—Jack's appearance of strength, regardless of whether he actually possesses it, is a tool he can use to win the boys to his side.
Personified authority sits on Jack's shoulder, a metaphor we can take to understand that Jack's desire to be the leader, and his enjoyment of being in charge, is guiding his decisions. Furthermore, authority chatters like an ape: in other words, it produces useless noise that Jack still listens to. The authority he already has distracts and tempts him into seizing more. Since the book is in part about human nature, Golding is making a claim here about what drives some people to violence, evil, and bad decision-making: a love of power.
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Chapter 12
Explanation and Analysis—Forest Fire:
During Chapter 2, after discovering Piggy's glasses can be used to spark a flame, the boys accidentally set a forest fire. The passage makes heavy use of figurative language:
One patch touched a tree trunk and scrambled up like a bright squirrel. The smoke increased, sifted, rolled outwards. The squirrel leapt on the wings of the wind and clung to another standing tree, eating downwards. Beneath the dark canopy of leaves and smoke the fire laid hold on the forest and began to gnaw. Acres of black and yellow smoke rolled steadily toward the sea. […] The flames, as though they were a kind of wild life, crept as a jaguar creeps on its belly toward a line of birch-like saplings that fledged an outcrop of the pink rock. They flapped at the first of the trees, and the branches grew a brief foliage of fire. The heart of flame leapt nimbly across the gap between the trees and then went swinging and flaring along the whole row of them.
First the fire is like a squirrel (simile), then it simply is one (metaphor). The flames are all sorts of "wild life": not only squirrels, but also jaguars. These metaphors indicate the fire's speed and ease of spreading. They also provide visceral imagery of the out-of-control fire. For much the same purposes, the fire is personified: the flames "leapt nimbly" and then "went swinging and flaring." Fire "began to gnaw" at the forest. This personification attributes hunger and excited destruction to fire. Just as the boys later become excited to cause destruction, seemingly without pausing to think about the consequences of their actions, so too does the fire here playfully and happily ruin a patch of jungle.
This early forest fire foreshadows the final events of the novel. In chapter 12, Jack's tribe sets fire to part of the forest to try to flush out Ralph.
Now the fire was nearer; those volleying shots were great limbs, trunks even, bursting. The fools! The fools! The fire must be almost at the fruit trees—what would they eat tomorrow?
Ralph hears a sound like "volleying shots," as if the fire is shooting at him, but it's instead the sound of wood splintering because of the fast-burning fire. Remember the playful yet destructive personification of the fire earlier? Now we see the consequences of that kind of "savage" behavior—the fire may kill Ralph today, but Jack and his tribe will have nothing to eat tomorrow. Again, savagery and hotheadedness work against civilization and life.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—The Pig's Skull:
In Chapter 12, while roaming the jungle, Ralph sees the pig skull Simon had been communicating with earlier. The narrator uses imagery, personification, and simile to describe this moment:
Ralph nearly flung himself behind a tree when he saw something standing in the center; but then he saw that the white face was bone and that the pig’s skull grinned at him from the top of a stick. He […] looked steadily at the skull that gleamed as white as ever the conch had done and seemed to jeer at him cynically. An inquisitive ant was busy in one of the eye sockets but otherwise the thing was lifeless. Or was it? Little prickles of sensation ran up and down his back. He stood, the skull about on a level with his face, and held up his hair with two hands. The teeth grinned, the empty sockets seemed to hold his gaze masterfully and without effort. What was it? The skull regarded Ralph like one who knows all the answers and won’t tell.
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.
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Explanation and Analysis—The Cry of a Bird:
In Chapter 12, Ralph hides from Jack's tribe, who are hunting him. He hears the other boys whoop and call as they search for him, the narrator using a simile:
The cry swept by him across the narrow end of the island from sea to lagoon, like the cry of a flying bird.
This is another example of the book's many natural images, and this one compares the hunting boys to animals—specifically, a flying bird. Although a bird is not most people's first idea of a vicious hunter, a bird of prey like an eagle can be swift and sharp-eyed while also being deadly. As the figurative language that compares the characters to animals generally serves to do, this simile dehumanizes the boys and emphasizes how the island has changed them. Maybe the primitive conditions they've landed in have unlocked something latent and atavistic within them; in other words, Golding suggests that a human can become an animal, under the right conditions.
Also note Golding's precise command of language in the quoted sentence. Rather than saying the cry moved past Ralph or another synonym, he writes that the cry "swept by him," much as a bird may sweep by in the air. Even his verb choice supports the following simile.
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