A View to a Death

Simon is dying again.

In the late afternoon, as I fold my legs up and sit on top of a table at the back of the classroom, I again reach page 152, that horrible page, and young Simon is again stabbed, beaten, and kicked to death by a mob of terrified and demented little boys. This is the fifth time today I have read Chapter 9 of William Golding's Lord of the Flies aloud, and even now it is awful, too awful to breeze by or to read without some measure of solemnity. As the stranded boys form a phalanx of spears, sticks, and clubs, as they dance and chant and descend into a dark and stormy world of instinct and appetite, I force myself to continue crying their vicious chant: Kill the beast! Spill his blood! Cut his throat! Do him in! It's horrible, but I don't stammer or stumble, for the words are catchy, their spondaic insistency pounding on us like waves or the percussive end of a spear. Even in our classroom in Seattle, we are aware somehow of the thunder, the hunger, and the primal terror back there on the beach. With the lights off, only the half-light of a cloudy April day filtering through the windows, our imaginations are dragged into this fiendish scene.

I can't stop us from getting there, to the bottom of the page, when the boys turn on one of their own. When "the circle became a horseshoe" and the mouth of jagged spears devours Simon, the compassionate, gentle boy who had discovered the secret of the island, that they had nothing to fear but the evil of their own dark natures. As Golding takes us through the murder, his subtle prose is lost on some of my students, who are either on the wrong page or are gazing at the clock, which has stalled, as it does every day, on 2:00 PM. But one girl is more astute; as soon as the small figure comes out of the forest to them, she knows what will happen.

"No!" she wails as I continue reading. She lays her book cover-down on the desk, folds her arms over her head like Simon. "Not Simon! That's awful! This is awful!"

I can relate. Ever since losing Beth in Little Women, I haven't been above grieving for fictional characters. There is something intimate about reading, about getting to know these characters through their actions and words, especially for someone who has lived as long in imagination as I have. I've brought them along, this time, in learning to love Simon, the child who helps others, whose common sense and bravery set him apart from the savagery of his peers. "He's the best character we've got, you guys," I've told them, wondering how obliquely I can describe a Christ figure without actually mentioning the name.

But I keep reading. I feel callous as I read these horrible words aloud, almost as if I were somehow complicit in this terrible crime, merely by bearing the news of it to my students. I try to find a tone that is solemn enough, respectful enough, for the gravity of this moment. I read the rest of the chapter, my voice and Golding's words eventually carrying Simon out to sea with the tide, among waves glowing with phosphorescence. It's beautiful, a dignified end for this saintly, sacrificed character.

As we pack up, my students express various levels of horror at the state of things, and I wish I could tell them that it got better. The truth, as I recall now, is that Simon's death won't fix things. Killed like so many innocents, perhaps Simon is Golding's cynical memorial to those lost in the two world wars which preceded his publishing of Lord of the Flies. At the end of this book, I think glumly, I'll have told them that people are basically bad. What am I doing to them?

One of the themes we've encountered in the novel has been the loss of innocence that gradually meets all of the boys. I think about Simon's last act, after his disillusioning encounter with the Devil, an act of compassion. I remind the kids that even after innocence is lost, goodness and compassion remain. "He's still Simon," I say. "Even after everything horrible he's seen today, he's still a helper. He's still good. Just not innocent."

Like them, I think now. Yes, if they believe it this book will take some of the luster off of the world, some of the inherent goodness to which perhaps some of them still hold. Today has been a rubbing away of innocence for me, even, as I have five times recited the details of a murder, engraving images into my mind that I may never wholly forget. I remember that literature is often gruesome, that violence is real and the truth of it must be revealed. Even when the truth is dark and dreadful, like today.

On the other side, I know, is the hope that they will grow up, even as they shed the naivete of childhood, into people capable of striving for truth and working compassion, courageously good against the evil they find in the world around them.