Simon

Simon’s compassion and perception make him one of the few boys able to see beyond the island’s fears, but that insight cannot protect him from the group’s violence. He recognizes that the beast is not a creature to be hunted, discovers the dead parachutist mistaken for it, and attempts to tell the others. In the storm-darkened confusion of a ritual dance, the boys instead treat Simon as the beast and kill him; the tide later carries his body out to sea.

Identity and Introduction

Simon first appears among the choir boys, sitting up after fainting and giving his name to Ralph. The narration presents him as slight and vivid, with a pallor that fades after his collapse. His fainting marks him as physically vulnerable, but he soon joins Ralph and Jack on the first expedition across The island. The choice places him beside the two boys who will become central rivals, although Simon does not seek the authority or recognition that either displays.

The choir’s leader, Jack Merridew, claims the group as hunters after Ralph is elected chief. Simon’s early place in this arrangement is therefore within a disciplined group that will later fracture. At the first meeting, his quiet willingness to join the expedition contrasts with Jack Merridew’s forceful self-assertion and Ralph’s emerging public role. Simon is included in the crucial first exploration, but he remains a less conspicuous presence than either of them.

Care and Relationships

Simon’s attention to others is most clearly shown in The forest, where the youngest boys follow him among the fruit trees. They cannot reach the choicest fruit, so he climbs or reaches into the foliage, picks it, and passes it down to their waiting hands. He continues until they have enough, then leaves them and follows a faint path farther into the forest. The act is practical and unannounced: unlike the boys’ later contests over leadership and meat, Simon’s help brings no authority or reward.

He also works with Ralph on the shelters near The beach. Ralph complains that the older boys have gone off to swim, eat, or play, leaving only Simon to help him through the work. Simon’s presence gives Ralph a companion in a task that the group has neglected, even as the shelters remain shaky and one has collapsed. The episode distinguishes Simon’s quiet reliability from Jack Merridew’s hunters, who prioritize the pursuit of meat.

Simon’s relationship with Ralph includes a degree of trust that becomes most visible when the group argues about the beast. Simon tries to express the possibility that it is not an animal outside them but something bound up with human nature. The assembly answers with noise and laughter rather than understanding. Later, after Simon’s death, Ralph insists that the killing was murder, while Piggy tries to call it an accident and urges him to forget it. Ralph’s insistence preserves Simon’s death as a moral fact the survivors cannot comfortably absorb.

The Beast and Simon’s Recognition

During an assembly about fear, Simon struggles to make his thought intelligible. He does not claim to know exactly what the beast is; instead, he suggests that it may be something within the boys themselves. The suggestion is met with derision, and the gathering’s disorder overwhelms his attempt to speak. The moment reveals the distance between Simon’s intuition and the group’s appetite for a tangible enemy that can be named, feared, and attacked.

That intuition takes a more disturbing form when Simon encounters the pig’s head offered to the beast. The Lord of the Flies appears to speak to him, declaring, “I'm the Beast,” and telling him that the beast is not something the boys can simply hunt and kill. The vision presses Simon toward the recognition that the threat is connected to the boys themselves. It also warns him that the others will harm him. Simon loses consciousness, but the encounter deepens rather than dispels his understanding: the island’s terror has become inseparable from the violence the boys enact.

When Simon reaches The mountain, he finds the source of the supposed beast. The humped figure is a dead parachutist, whose body and equipment have been held together and moved by the wind. Simon examines the lines and the remains closely enough to understand what he is seeing, then frees the body from the rocks so that the wind no longer makes it rise and bow. The discovery turns the boys’ frightening sighting into a human death and exposes how fear has transformed an observable fact into a monster.

Simon looks down and sees smoke from the boys’ new camp farther along the shore. He understands that they have moved away from the mountain because of the supposed beast. The fire at the platform appears to be out or producing no smoke, while a thin stream rises from the relocated camp. Simon recognizes the urgency of carrying the news: the beast is harmless, though horrible, and the others need to know. He starts down, but his legs give way and he can manage only a stagger.

Death and Aftermath

During the storm, Jack Merridew’s group performs a dance around the fire, chanting and moving in a circle. The ritual’s repeated rhythm draws even Ralph and Piggy toward its temporary sense of safety. Then Simon emerges from The forest, calling out about the dead man on the hill. In the darkness, rain, and lightning, the boys do not hear or recognize his message. They see him as the beast they have been rehearsing themselves to attack.

The circle closes around Simon. The boys strike and tear at him as the chant intensifies, and he falls over the rocks onto the sand. The narration makes the reversal stark: the figure the group has treated as an outside threat is a boy trying to bring them the truth. After the mob disperses, the rain eases. The tide advances over the beach, gathers around Simon’s body, and carries it toward the open sea. The calm movement of the water contrasts with the collective violence that killed him, but does not undo it.

In the aftermath, Ralph names Simon’s death as murder. Piggy argues that darkness, thunder, fear, and the dance made it an accident, then urges Ralph not to tell Sam and Eric that they took part. Ralph refuses to settle into that account: he remembers that the boys were there, and that he too had been on the edge of the circle. Simon’s death thus becomes both an irreversible loss and a test of whether the survivors will acknowledge their own participation or hide behind fear and denial.

Narrative Significance

Simon’s story repeatedly sets care and truthful perception against the island’s competing forms of power. He feeds the youngest boys without seeking status, helps with work that others abandon, and recognizes the parachutist as a dead human being rather than a supernatural creature. Yet his insight arrives in a community increasingly organized around hunting, spectacle, and shared fear. When he finally tries to communicate what he has learned, the group’s ritual has made recognition impossible.

His death gives terrible force to the insight he struggled to express at the assembly: the danger is not only imagined as an external beast but enacted by the boys themselves. The discovery on The mountain could have corrected their fear; instead, Simon’s attempt to carry that knowledge back ends in violence. His body’s passage out to sea closes his individual arc, while Ralph’s later refusal to call the killing harmless preserves the moral consequence within the surviving group.