楊懿菡 (Sophie Yang) October, 2010

Sovereignty, Exception, and Homo Sacer

in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies

Sometimes considered as an allegorical narrative of the darkness of human

nature, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies can also be seen as a novel about how

human society is constructed. The novel presents many children who are stranded on

an isolated island after encountering an airplane crash. Coming from civilized society,

the children are trying to construct law and order on the primitive island. However, as

the novel suggests, law and order do not work successfully on the island. On the

contrary, the powers of human desires and inner fears take control of the whole island.

Children who do not belong to the majority cannot survive in the story. Being

considered as the outsiders of the newly formed society, these children will be killed

as what Giorgio Agamben calls “homo sacer.”

In Lord of the Flies, one of the most interesting phenomena is that the three

hominess sacri, Piggy, Simon, and Ralph are all closely connected with “the lord of

the flies,” the head of the pig. The most apparent example is one boy being called

“Piggy.” Whether deliberate or not, Golding seems to connect human beings with the

beasts. Consider one of the most intriguing dialogues in the novel when Simon seems

to hear the lord of the flies talking:

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!” said the

head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated

places echoed with the parody of laughter. “You knew, didn’t you? I’m part

of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are

what they are? (177)

What does it mean when the head says: “I’m part of you?” The author seems to

suggest that the boundary between humans and beasts is indefinite. The most terrible

beast is within humans’ hearts. Examining the homo sacer in the novel, this paper

aims to discuss the construction of the society, the shifting of sovereignty, and the role

of homo sacer in Lord of the Flies according to Agamben’s theory.

With Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben discusses

the constitution of the state of society and the place of the individual within it. The

relationship between sovereignty, exception and homo sacer is an important issue in

the book. Besides that, however, the concept of “biopolitics” is the foundation of

Agamben’s theories because he connects it closely with modern politics: modern

society has the quality of biopolitics in which the distinction between “bios” and

“zoe” is blurred:

what characterizes modern politics . . . is that, together with the process by

which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare

life—which is originally situated at the margins of the political order—

gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and

inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone

of irreducible indistinction. (9)

Back in the Greek times, the Greeks had already separated the conception of life into

two terms: “zoe” and “bios.” Zoe indicates “the simple fact of living common to all

living beings (animals, men, or gods)” while “bios” presents “the form or way of

living proper to an individual or a group” (1). In other words, “bios” already indicates

the unique characteristic of human nature that is “politics.” Agamben pushes this idea

farther:

Only a little later, after all, human politics is distinguished from that of other

living beings in that it is founded, through a supplement of politicity

[policita] tied to language, on a community not simply of the pleasant and

the painful but of the good and the evil and of the just and the unjust. (2-3).

Human beings are different from other living creatures because they have the sense of

“politics.”

Agamben in fact borrows the term “biopolitics” from Michel Foucault. He

summarizes Foucault’s idea of biopolitics in The History of Sexuality: “at the

threshold of the modern era, natural life begins to be included in the mechanisms and

calculations of State power, and politics turns into biopolitics” (3). Agamben agrees

with Foucault that “power penetrates subjects’ very bodies and forms of life” (5). Yet

unlike Foucault, who asserts that biopolitics emerges after sovereignty, Agamben

contends that “biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception” (6). That is

why he claims “It can also even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is

the original activity of sovereign power” (6). By controlling people’s everyday life,

Sovereign attains to power.

Sovereignty has the power to suspend and cease the law in an urgent situation by

creating the state of exception. For example, in Roman times, the Senate had the

ability to force the law to come to a standstill in “iustutium,” which means a state of

emergency. Therefore, “the sovereign, having the legal power to suspend the validity

of the law, legally places himself outside the law” from which a paradox is created

because “I, the sovereign, who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing

outside the law” (15), which also echoes with what Agamben argues: “The paradox of

sovereignty consists in the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside

the juridical order” (15). The example of the Senate indicates Agamben’s concept of

“potentiality.” Agamben considers that the characteristic of sovereignty is its

potentiality. It can remain in the potential state and does not need to “pass into

actuality” (28). That is why the Senate has its strong power to suspend the law,

whether in the Roman Republic or in the Roman Empire.

In Agamben’s theories, the secret of power is in the occupying and capturing of

the exception. Quoting from Carl Schmitt, Agamben agrees with his idea that

“authority proves itself not to need law to create law . . . The exception is more

interesting than the regular case. The latter proves nothing; the exception proves

everything” (qtd. Agamben16). What is an exception? An exception is “a kind of

exclusion,” yet it is not “absolutely without relation to the rule” (17), which means it

is not totally “chaos that precedes order but rather the situation that results from its

suspension” (18). The “exception” is “the condition of being included through an

exclusion, of being in relation to something from which one is excluded or which one

cannot fully assume” (26-27). Clearly, the exception is the state which is neither here

nor there, it is in between. Just because of its vagueness, it provides more room for

discussion.

Another peculiar quality of exception is its paradox: “it cannot be defined either

as a situation of fact or as a situation of right, but instead institutes a paradoxical

threshold of indistinction between the two” (18). Exception is not a situation of fact

and right because it can only be created through the “suspension of the rule;” it is

tentative. Interestingly, the importance of exception is just revealed by nothing but its

ambiguity:

In this case, the sovereign exception is the fundamental localization

(Ortung), which does not limit itself to distinguishing what is inside from

what is outside but instead traces a threshold (the state of exception)

between the two, on the basis of which outside and inside, the normal

situation and chaos, enter into those complex topological relations that

make the validity of the juridical order possible. (19)

The meaning of ban is exactly the elaboration of the situation of exception: therefore,

“The relation of exception is a relation of ban” (28) because “He who has been

banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather

abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and

law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable” (28). It is hard to decide whether

the man who is banned is “outside or inside the juridical order” (29), which causes the

ambiguity.

A life totally under the power of sovereignty is what Agamben names the

“bare-life.” The concept of homo sacer is tightly related to the concept of bare-life

and biopolitics. In fact, homo sacer is the vital manifestation of his philosophical

conception of sovereignty and exception. In the archaic Roman law, there is a

punishment called “homo esto.” If any man committed “homo esto,” he is called a

“homo sacer.” Pompeius Festus defines it as:

The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a

crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not

be condemned for homicide; in the first tribunitian law, in fact, it is noted

that “if someone kills the one who is sacred according to the plebiscite, it

will not be considered homicide.” This is why it is customary for a bad

impure man to be called sacred. (qtd. Agamben 71)

Homo Sacer is like the werewolf which “had to remain in the collective

unconscious as a monstrous hybrid of human and animal, divided between the forest

and the city—the werewolf—is, therefore, in its origin the figure of the man who has

been banned from the city” (105). He is the one who is banned and abandoned from

the society. He can keep living or be killed. Facing homo sacer, everybody has the

same power as sovereignty does. In one sense, as Ward W. Fowler reveals, “Sacer

esto is in fact a curse; and homo sacer on whom this curse falls is an outcast, a banned

man, tabooed, dangerous” (qtd Agamben 79). Therefore, it is “a threshold of

indistinction and of passage between animal and man, physis and nomos, exclusion

and inclusion: the life of the bandit is the life if the loup garou, the werewolf, who is

precisely neither man nor beast, and who dwells paradoxically within both while

belonging to neither” (105).

Homo sacer, moreover, is put into exception, into the edge or reduced to the state

of bare life. A homo sacer is someone who is abandoned from both the divine law and

the human law because the life of homo sacer cannot be sacrificed; therefore he does

not belong to the divine law (ius divinum). On the other hand, anyone who kills him

would not be punished; therefore, he does not belong to the human law (ius humanum)

either. A homo sacer is someone who is totally under the control of the judicial law

belonging to sovereignty. In other words, sovereignty has the authority to suspend

both the divine law and the human law and, hence takes total control of human lives.

As a result, the lives of human beings are like lives naked before sovereignty.

Everyone has the potentiality of being treated as a homo sacer. In this sense, the life

of a homo sacer is indeed a life of a bare-life.

Homo sacer, like the rule of the sovereign, is paradoxical because s/he is

someone who “may be killed but not sacrificed” (83). Actually the word “sacer” itself

also has two meanings. From the etymology of Latin, “Sacer designates the person or

a thing that one cannot touched without dirtying oneself or without dirtying; hence the

double meaning of ‘sacred’ or ‘accursed’” (qtd. Agamben 79). Homo sacer and

sovereignty actually share more similarities besides the fact that both are paradoxical:

Here the structural analogy between the sovereign exception and sacratio

shows its full sense. As the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign

and homo sacer presents two symmetrical figures that have the same

structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom

all men are potentially hominess sacri, and homo sacer is the one with

respect to whom all men act as sovereigns. (84)

In the example of homo esto and homo sacer, it is apparent that the judicial law is

more powerful than the divine and human law. Before sovereignty, people are all the

same; therefore, it can be said that the ultimate goal of sovereignty is to control

exception and the bare-life within it.

Though it sounds rather hard to achieve, yet homo sacer in the state of exception

might provide hope and opportunity for the whole system because:

When its borders begin to be blurred, the bare life that dwelt there frees

itself in the city and becomes both subject and object of the conflicts of the

political order, the one place for both the organization of State power and

emancipation from it. (9)

Just because being put into the border, into the extreme, human beings serving as

homo sacer might have the potentiality to seek an opportunity, to see something

normal people who are within sovereignty cannot see. Unfortunately, after all, homo

sacer most of the time is just a scapegoat for sovereignty. Sovereignty needs to

extricate something in order to retain its unity. In that sense, both Jesus Christ and

millions of Jews who suffered in the holocaust are good manifestations.

Lord of the Flies is a novel in which we can apply in interesting ways Agamben’s

theories of sovereignty, exception, and homo sacer, because the children on the

isolated island actually attempt to construct society by using different powers that are

analogous to that of sovereignty. One group is trying to create sovereignty based on

reason and order, only to be defeated by another rising sovereignty that resorts to

human desires and inner fears. Trying to control unperceivable fear, the sovereignty of

Jack is equal to the control of the state of exception, because the one who can control

exception is the one who possesses the real power. Controlling human desires, such as

for food, and various fears of the group are not enough, as mentioned above:

sovereignty needs to extricate something in order to retain its unity; therefore,

creating homo sacer becomes important and is indeed the key strategy of Jack’s

sovereignty. Within Ralph’s rational sovereignty, there is no one, for example, killed;

however, as the time of Jack’s sovereignty unfolds, deaths begin to appear. Those

children who are sacrificed can be seen as hominess sacri. They are sacrificed because

they are deemed somehow different from the majority and thus by killing them, the

sense of sovereignty achieves greater solidity and firmer standing because of the

common enemy. By killing homo sacer, the children endorsing sovereignty do not

fear for their own lives. Also they do not dare to disobey sovereignty.

In the process of Ralph and Piggy’s efforts to establish their ideal society, the text

appears to argue that the embodiment of power is essential to the construction of a

functioning society. Ralph’s possession of the conch is an embodiment of power.

Ralph and Piggy personify civilization and rationality. Ralph is a healthy, strong and

positive twelve-year-old boy, while on the contrary, Piggy is a weak and defective fat

boy. He not only has asthma, but also congenital nearsightedness. Piggy’s physical

condition suggests that living in the wild is not suitable for him, and indicates his

strangeness in comparison with the other boys. Ralph and Piggy are two important

figures trying to bring civilized law and order into the island. Though Ralph is a

natural leader, yet he cannot succeed without Piggy’s help. Piggy, with no doubt,

plays the role of Ralph’s staff officer. Piggy is the one who first suggests having a

meeting: ‘I expect we’ll want to know all their names,’ said the fat boy, ‘and make a

list. We ought to have a meeting’” (16). When Ralph still appreciates the nature,

Piggy keeps pushing him to do something: “‘we got to find the others. We got to do

something’” (20). Piggy is the one who is good at logical reasoning and senses the

urgency to reconstruct the civilization.

Piggy is actually more rational than Ralph, and it is also Piggy who gives power

to the conch. When they find the conch, Piggy suggests, “‘we can use this to call the

others. Have a meeting. They’ll come when they hear us—’” (22). After Ralph blows

the conch, the scattered children respond to the sound. From this point, the conch

starts to represent power. When Piggy moves around the children, asking their names,

the children “gave him the same simple obedience that they had given to the men with

megaphones” (25).The children deem that Ralph has power and naturally Piggy, who

seems to follow Ralph, also shares certain power. In this aspect, the use of the conch

helps to construct a sense of a power great enough to form a society.

In the appearance of Jack and his group of chorus boys, Golding presents the

power of groups and the establishment of rules as crucial issues throughout the novel.

The introduction of the chorus is quite impressive: “Within the diamond haze of the

beach something dark was fumbling along. . . . Then the creature stepped from mirage

on to clear sand, and they saw that the darkness was not all shadow but mostly

clothing” (26). The creature is the party of the chorus. The creature metaphor makes

the boys seem like part of a bigger organization. The group of the boys is a unity.

They dress in the same way: “each boy wore square black cap with a silver badge in it.

Their bodies, from throat to ankle, were hidden by black cloaks which bore a long

silver cross on the left breast and each neck was finished off with a hambone frill”

(26). The boy who stands out, Jack, is the leader: “The boy who controlled them was

dressed in the same way though his cap badge was golden. When his party was about

ten yards from the platform he shouted an order and they halted, gasping, sweating,

swaying in the fierce light” (26-27).

The narrator uses words such as “control” and “order” here. The novel always

suggests that when a group is formed, there must be a leader to maintain the order by

enforcing the rules. Distinguished from the others’ silver badges, Jack’s golden

badge—like Ralph’s conch—represents power. The relationship between human

beings is unavoidably hierarchical. At first Piggy asks the names of the children

spiritedly, but when he observes the group’s power, he becomes timid: “Piggy asked

no names. He was intimidated by this uniformed superiority and the offhand authority

in Merridew’s voice. He shrank to the other side of Ralph and busied himself with his

glasses” (28).

After Jack and Ralph meet, the children decide to choose a leader by voting. The

action of voting suggests that the children still obey the law of civilized society. The

act of casting votes is a custom that originates in civilized society as well as an

important step toward the sense of law and order that Ralph and Piggy try to construct

on the island. Yet most of the children do not understand what a vote really represents;

they are attracted by the novelty of it: “This toy of voting was almost as pleasing as

the conch” (30). Though Jack volunteers to be the chief, yet because he has Ralph as

his opponent, he cannot help but accept the idea of having a vote. Ralph wins the vote

because “there was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was

his size, and attractive appearance; and most obscurely, yet most powerfully, there

was the conch” (30).At this point, the new leader creates a powerful sense of law and

order.

After he becomes the leader, Ralph and his consulter Piggy try their best to

preserve law and order on the island. Ralph starts to regulate rules for all the children.

He claims: “We can’t have everybody talking at once. We’ll have to have ‘Hands up’

like at school” (43). The new rule is that “I’ll give the conch to the next person to

speak. He can hold it when he’s speaking” (43). Jack also supports Ralph by saying

“‘We’ll have rules!’ he cried excitedly. ‘Lots of rules! Then when anyone breaks

‘em—’” (44). At this point, Jack supports Ralph because Ralph has empowered him

as the hunter. The text dismisses the implication of the original “creature” of the

chorus: thus, “The choir, noticeably less of a group, had discarded their cloaks” (42).

The wording seems to suggest that “group” is rather a vague idea by the clear fact that

now all the children belong to the group of Ralph. To exercise his power, Ralph starts

to distribute tasks, for example asking the hunters to keep the fire and the others to

bring water and build huts.

The society that Ralph rules unfortunately does not work out because the

children refuse to obey the empty concept of law and order. Agamben’s theory of

sovereignty suggests that Ralph would fail to become the sovereign of the group, even

though he tries desperately. The children, as a matter of fact, do not submit themselves

to the rules. Take Jack’s hatred towards Piggy as an example: one time Piggy wants to

speak when he holds the conch, yet Jack retorts “The conch doesn’t count on top of

the mountain, so you shut up” (54). What is more, after Jack finishing hunting and

going back to find Ralph, Ralph complains to him that “They’re hopeless. The older

ones aren’t much better. D’you see? All day I’ve been working with Simon. No one

else. They’re off bathing, or eating, or playing” (64). The crisis of Ralph’s superficial

sovereignty is imminent. The artificial concept of law and order cannot function

feasibly on the savage island, because rationality and cerebration cannot compete with

the inner fear and natural desires of human beings.

Jack, on the contrary, forms his power by controlling human desires and inner

fear. As soon as Jack hunts his first pig, the political situation of the island changes

immediately. The unstable sovereignty of Ralph has gradually been overthrown. After

he masters the art of hunting, Jack has no reason to listen to Ralph and follow his

constructed civilized law. Jack has had the ambition to be the leader from the very

start; therefore, it is not surprising that he wants to revolt and become the leader

himself. Aside from controlling the source of food, Jack provides a solution to the

collective fear of the children, which is to simply kill the monster (if it is concrete and

can be killed) or to sacrifice the head of the pig to the monster (if it is invisible and he

cannot kill it).

Unlike Ralph and Piggy, who do not believe in the existence of any monster,

Jack understands and experiences the fear when he hunts in the forest:

“If you’re hunting sometimes you catch yourself feeling as if—” He

flushed suddenly.

“There’s nothing in it of course. Just a feeling. But you can feel as if

you’re not hunting, but—being hunted; as if something’s behind you all the

time in the jungle.” (67)

Fear in fact can emerge in various forms; it can come from both inside and outside.

The fear Jack is experiencing here can be explained as the smallness of human beings

and the uncontrollable power of nature—the sinister environment of the island. The

perception of the frightening power of nature is coherent with the devastation of

Ralph’s lawful, orderly and rational sovereignty (which perishes rather quickly).

Unlike Ralph’s sovereignty, Jack’s is irrational and dominated by violence.

Switching from Ralph’s sovereignty to Jack’s is like a return to primitive society from

civilization. Jack’s group throws away the burden of civilization completely by

resorting to animal instinct in order to survive, although there are some transitional

processes. The reader might wonder about the question: if the children choose to

abandon rationality at last, why do they obey civilized rules at first? The narrator does

provide an explanation of why the little children obey the summons of the conch:

“They obeyed the summons of the conch, partly because Ralph blew it, and he was

big enough to be a link with the adult world of authority; and partly because they

enjoyed the entertainment of the assemblies” (75).

As the passage indicates, the influence of authority of the civilized society is

deeply rooted in the children’s minds. Another similar example is Roger’s not daring

to throw the stones to the playing “littluns,” even though he wants to: “Rounding the

squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law.

Roger’s arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in

ruins” (78). Although they need time, the children sooner or later will refuse to obey

the rules as long as they know there is no one to punish them.

Furthermore, when Jack learns to paint his face as aborigines do, he totally gives

up the constraint of morality and civilization:

He looked in astonishment, no longer at himself but at an awesome

stranger. . . . He began to dance and his laughter became a bloodthirsty

snarling. He capered towards Bill, and the mask was a thing on its own,

behind when Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness. (80)

The mask “compelled” them (80). Throwing away the burden of civilization, Jack’s

group hunts down a pig and Jack little by little starts to grasp power. Jack’s power

shows by his teasing of Piggy for not giving him meat to eat. Piggy, who cannot resist

the temptation of meat, asks: “Aren’t I having none?” (92). Seizing this chance, “Jack

had meant to leave him in doubt, as an assertion of power; but Piggy by advertising

his omission made more cruelty necessary” (92).

In Jack’s sovereignty, out of fear and blindness, children become mad and start to

kill certain children who they regard as outsiders. Those children are hominess sacri

who “can be killed but not sacrificed.” The children’s murder echoes Agamben’s

words, “the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially

hominess sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as

sovereigns” (84). As mentioned earlier, Fowler argues that homo sacer is an “outcast,

a banned man, tabooed, dangerous” (qtd Agamben 79). In other words, homo sacer is

highly possible someone different from the majority, which means an outsider. All of

the three hominess sacri, Simon, Piggy, and Ralph, fall into this category. They are

banned from the majority intentionally and thus are indeed scapegoats. Yet noticeably

Golding does present them differently: all three of them are thinkers and just because

of that, they cannot agree with Jack’s sovereignty, in which fear and desire dominate.

Simon, who is the first one to be killed, is a mysterious character. He is not only

somewhat detached from the others, but also the only one who has communication

with both the world of nature and the lord of the flies. No one understands Simon, and

both Ralph and Jack consider him “queer and funny” (69). Piggy even once says that

“he’s cracked” (164). Simon always enters into the forests alone and does nothing.

Simon does not belong to either Ralph or Jack’s society; in that sense he is an outsider.

He is also a prophet because he assures Ralph that he can go back to civilized society.

Most importantly, when the lord of the flies is killed, Simon is there, although he just

observes and does not join the killing. After cutting the head of the pig, Jack shouts

out “This head is for the beast. It is a gift” (170) and then leaves. Simon stays there

and has a most intricate and profound conversation with the head of the pig.

The conversation between Simon and the lord of the flies reveals the truth that

terror actually is within people themselves. Simon seems to hear the head speaking to

him: “You know, didn’t you? I’m part of you?” (177). From this words, we may

understand that Simon indentifies here with the sacrificial head. He is related to the

sacrificial head because in the end he is killed because his society considers him a

monster. The truth is that he intends to report to the crowd that the monster is actually

a rotten human corpse. He is homo sacer because he dies as the substitute for the

supposed monster. He is killed by the majority. The order of the society on the island

dictates that those who kill him will not suffer punishment. Simon cannot be

sacrificed because even though he identifies himself with the sacrificial head, he is not

a pig, no matter what. No one talks about his death, and his sacrifice is sadly

meaningless.

The second homo sacer is Piggy. The narrator has already told the reader that

Piggy is an outsider; therefore, it is easy for him to become a target: “There had

grown up tacitly among the bignus the opinion that Piggy was an outsider, not only by

accent, which did not matter, but by fat, and ass-mar, and specs, and a certain

disinclination for manual labour” (81). Even though Ralph is somehow close to him,

he sometimes regards Piggy as a nuisance: “Piggy was a bore; his fat, his ass-mar, his

matter-of-fact ideas were dull: but there was always a little pleasure to be got out of

pulling his leg, even if one did it by accident” (81). Though Ralph at this point has not

started to consider the merit and significance of Piggy, he will know eventually.

The text always seems to use Piggy as a medium to solve the embarrassment

between Ralph and the boys. In Piggy and Ralph’s second approach to Jack’s group

and their desire for meat, the boys tease Piggy:

At this moment the boys who were cooking at the fire suddenly hauled off a

great chunk of meat and ran with it towards the grass. They bumped Piggy

who was burnt, and yelled and danced. Immediately, Ralph and the crowd

of boys were united and relieved by the storm of laughter. Piggy once more

was the center of social derision so that everyone felt cheerful and normal.

(184)

It is clear that Piggy so often becomes an outsider; no one respects him. The boys

snatch his glasses to ignite the fire and pick on him to solve the embarrassment

between them.By teasing Piggy, Jack, the sovereign, does show his power by not

giving him meat to eat.

Finally, when Ralph and Piggy attempt to take back Piggy’s stolen glasses, Roger

kills him by pushing the huge rock from the cliff. The narrator compares Piggy’s

death with the pig’s death: “The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee:

the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist. . . . His head

opened and stuff came out and turned red. Piggy’s arms and legs twitched a bit, like a

pig’s after it has been killed” (222-23). In this aspect, Piggy is a homo sacer because

any one who belongs to sovereignty has the right to kill him without punishment.

Piggy cannot be sacrificed as well, because he is not a real pig which can be sacrificed

to the monster.

The last homo sacer is Ralph. He becomes homo sacer and Jack hunts him

because he was once the leader and naturally becomes an eyesore to the new leader.

After the death of Simon, Piggy and Ralph run away from the sovereignty of Jack. Yet,

later, because Jack steals Piggy’s eyeglasses at night, Jack and Piggy go to argue with

him. However, Jack’s group refuses to listen to reason. As soon as Jack sees Ralph

entering into his territory, he shouts: “You go away, Ralph. You keep to your end. This

is my end and my tribe. You leave me alone” (217). When the negotiation fails, Jack

commands: “Grab them!” (220). Soon after Roger kills Piggy, Ralph starts his life in

exile. There is no one in his sovereignty except himself. Thirsty and hungry, Ralph

considers the possibility of reconciling with Jack’s group, yet he knows that it is

impossible: “Lying there in the darkness, he knew he was an outcast. ‘Cos I had some

sense’” (228-29).

Ralph still possesses his sense of rationality and, as an enemy of Jack, lacks a

place to live on the island: “These painted savages would go further and further, then

there was that indefinable connection between himself and Jack; who therefore would

never let him alone; never” (226). When Ralph approaches the castle on the rock, he

encounters the twins who are performing their duties as guards. The twins whisper to

him: “‘They hate you, Ralph. They’re going to do you.’ ‘They’re going to hunt you

to-morrow.’” (232). Ralph asks why, he says: “But I’ve done nothing…I only wanted

to keep up a fire!” (232). The conversation ends when “Roger sharpened a stick at

both ends” (234). The reader knows that the head of the pig is stuck at a sharp stick.

The savage children try to kill Ralph in the same way they kill a pig.

The example of Ralph confirms that “anyone can become a homo sacer.”

Although Ralph once was the sovereign of the island and respected by the children,

when Jack snatches him, he becomes nothing. Simon and Piggy, though somewhat

different from the other children, have once belonged to the majority. It is

sovereignty’s choice that makes them outsiders. All three of them are put into the state

of exception and shoulder a sense of groundless sin. Interestingly, all the three

hominess sacri are connected with the hog and are killed or die like the hog. The

boundary between humans and beasts is vague and indistinct. In addition to the

similarity between homo sacer and the hog, the “beast” that frightens the children

exists in their minds. Golding seems to suggest that it is the evil within human’s hearts

that frightens the children as Jack feels in the jungle: “as if you’re not hunting,

but—being hunted; as if something’s behind you all the time in the jungle’” (67).

After all, there is no “monster” in the jungle; the “monster” they have seen is a human

corpse.

Though the atmosphere of Lord of the Flies is quite cruel and dark, the example

of Ralph, however, suggests an optimistic and hopeful side. Although Ralph receives

the treatment of a homo sacer, he does not die. He is the one who experiences what

other boys do not experience; therefore, he understands more: “Ralph wept for the end

of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise

friend called Piggy” (248). Yet, Ralph is not saved and can forget everything because

the civilization to which he will return is not a paradise either. Ralph and the boys are

saved by an officer, which suggests that the war is continuing. He still needs to face

another war time that might be as dark as what he has experienced on the island.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford

UP, 1995. Print.

Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. 1955. New York: Capricorn, 1959. Print.