Simon’s death is the turning point at which fear of the beast becomes lethal violence against a human being. During a storm, the boys’ ritual dance draws Simon into their circle; they mistake him for the creature they fear and attack him, then leave his body to the tide. The killing exposes how thoroughly collective excitement and terror have displaced the order the boys once tried to maintain.

Causes and Background

Simon first appears as a choirboy who has fainted; after sitting up, he gives Ralph his name. His early place in the group is therefore marked not by authority but by physical vulnerability. Later, when the boys try to build a signal fire on The mountain, Simon points out that Piggy’s glasses were used to kindle it. Yet Jack dismisses the conch’s authority there, and the argument over who may speak and how the fire should be maintained shows the rules’ uncertain reach even while the boys still depend on cooperation for rescue.

Jack’s face-painting marks a more radical change in the group’s conduct. Using white clay, red clay, and charcoal, he paints one side of his face white, the other red, and draws a black stripe across it. Seeing the painted face reflected in water, he responds as if confronted by an unfamiliar stranger; behind the mask, he dances and laughs with a bloodthirsty intensity. The transformation draws the other boys toward hunting and loosens the restraint that had attached to their ordinary identities.

That movement from hunting to ritual violence is reinforced by the killing of the sow. The hunters pursue and stab her through the forest until Jack drives his knife into her throat. Afterward, Jack orders the head fixed on a sharpened stick and declares it a gift for the beast. The others hurry away, but Simon remains concealed among the leaves, staring at the offering. The head’s grin and the flies around it make the gift a grim focus for the fear the boys have projected onto an imagined enemy; Simon’s solitary encounter with it precedes the night when he will try to carry knowledge back to the group.

The Storm, Dance, and Killing

As a storm gathers, Jack calls the boys to dance in the open space beyond the fire. The scene echoes the hunt: Roger plays the pursued pig, while the hunters carry spears and others take spits or firewood as clubs. The younger boys run around the outside of the ring. Even Ralph and Piggy, who have come to Castle Rock with Ralph, find themselves drawn into the circle, taking comfort in the bodies hemming in the terror of the storm. The chant, “Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!” settles into a regular beat, and the dancing gathers the boys into what seems less like a set of individuals than a single moving body.

Lightning and thunder intensify the confusion. As frightened boys break from the ring, Simon emerges from the forest, stumbling on his knees and arms. He is trying to tell them about the dead man on the hill, but the chant and the storm overwhelm his words. The circle turns into a horseshoe around him. The boys cry that the beast has arrived; sticks fall, and the chanting crowd closes in. Simon struggles forward and breaks through the ring, only to fall down the steep rock toward the sand. The others rush after him, striking, biting, and tearing at him without speaking. Their belief that they are attacking a beast has made the violence collective and immediate, while Simon’s effort to bring them the truth goes unheard.

After the crowd disperses, the storm passes. Simon’s body lies on the beach near the sea, and the tide advances over the sand. In the moonlit water, the luminous creatures at the edge of the shallows gather around him; the rising water covers his hair and lifts his body. The tide carries him gently away from the island and out toward the open sea. The passage from beating to quiet natural movement does not undo the killing: it leaves Simon’s death as the consequence of a group ritual that converted fear into violence, while the sea carries away the person who had come to reveal what the boys had mistaken for a beast.

Aftermath and Significance

The storm’s ending places two bodies in motion at once. The parachutist, whose arrival had helped give the boys’ fear a visible shape, is blown from the mountain, carried across the lagoon and over the reef toward the sea. Simon, who had tried to tell the crowd about the dead man on the hill, is carried away by the rising tide. The parallel movements sharpen the irony of the scene: the boys have killed the person who might have corrected their mistake, while the body they misidentified is itself swept from their sight. The storm passes, but its violence has not brought understanding or safety.

Simon’s death belongs to a wider collapse of the boys’ shared restraints. Later, at Castle Rock, Piggy still holds up the conch as he argues for rules and rescue; Roger releases a great rock, killing him and shattering the shell. The contrast marks how far the group has moved from the hope that a common object and agreed procedures could govern their disputes. Simon was killed in the confusion of a storm-driven dance; Piggy is killed amid an open confrontation in which the old authority is deliberately destroyed. Together, the deaths show violence changing from a collective frenzy in which the victim is mistaken for a beast to force used against those who still appeal to order.

The pursuit of Ralph carries that breakdown to its final crisis. Jack’s hunters chase him through the forest and set the island ablaze; Ralph escapes the flames onto the beach, where a naval officer arrives after seeing the smoke. The boys’ painted faces and sharpened sticks confront the officer as evidence of a warlike spectacle, even as the fire that brings rescue is consuming the island. Simon’s murder therefore stands within the sequence that ends in rescue but does not restore what has been lost: the boys are removed from danger only after their society has abandoned the restraint and mutual recognition that might have protected them from one another.

The Sea’s Counter-Image

The narration shifts from the crowd’s frantic, wordless violence to the tide’s measured movement, without turning that movement into an undoing of the murder. As the water reaches the stains in the sand, bright sea creatures gather around Simon; the rising tide catches his hair and cheek in silver light, and a bubble escapes his mouth as his body turns gently in the water. The scene then widens from this small bodily motion to the pull of sun and moon on the waters of the earth, placing his death within a vast, indifferent rhythm. That change of scale gives the ending its severe contrast: the boys’ fear has produced a deliberate-seeming human catastrophe, while the sea carries Simon away in silence, beyond the group that failed to hear him.