Who Are The Followers In Lord Of The Flies

Leaders, visionaries, and followers. This is what the world is made of. By scaling down this world, William Golding, the author of The Lord of the Flies, created a small tropical island inhabited by lost British school boys. By living unsupervised in the wild, these boys found their natural behaviour as humans. Most of them can be categorized into the three sections from the beginning of the paragraph, but there is a best example for each. Ralph is a leader, Roger is a follower, and Simon is a visionary.

A leader is charming through his physical and character qualities. He has the ability to understand, communicate and know how to organise the group. At least for the beginning, a leader seems like an ideal being, which makes him appealing
to the rest. Sadly, in time, the public usually changes its initial views of this person, as it happened to Ralph. William Golding describes him as a “fair haired” boy, with a “boxer-like body”, which clearly denotes physical charm. He is also the one who blew the conch to group everyone at first, which made people see him as a natural leader from the beginning. With these characteristics, the author pointed Ralph as a leader in a fairly obvious way. This is also the reason why he got voted for leader over Jack Merridew, who was a mean looking boy. Ralph’s first actions as a leader were to organise and set rules for the group. He decided that Jack and his choir were to be hunters, while the “littluns” became a group of not-so-important members of the tribe. This shows the way the leader divides his members into social ranks from the important to the least important ones. Ralph also set the conch rule, which is that during assemblies the only ones who could talk were the chief and the person who possessed the conch at the moment. The boy saw huge need of structure due to the adults’ absence, reason why he introduced this rule that reminds one of the class atmosphere. In real-life situations, such as sports teams, companies, or even political leaders, a public’s euphoria and excitement about a new chief usually wears off in time, causing this leader to lose respect. This is what happened with Ralph and his tribe. Once Jack started providing meat for the group it seemed like everyone forgot about the common sense and realism, and embraced new, crazy ideas. The author describes through this situation what happened in Europe during World War 2, when the common sense and realistic leaders disappeared under insane ideas.

In an army or war-like example, a follower would be the soldier receiving order to fight, kill, or just simply to subordinate to the higher hierarchy.
A King, a President, or a General would never go on the battlefield that he is controlling, and only their lower men would get their hands dirty for them. An ideal follower respects the rules and never questions orders. In The Lord of the Flies, the most obvious character of this kind was Roger. His follower nature showed up ever since he was introduced. He was throwing rocks after the other children, and because of his fear of breaking the rules from home, he was missing on purpose. The results of his action revealed that he might have been respecting rules religiously back home. Later on the island, he became Jack’s main follower. When the “Chief” assigned him a role, such as guarding the “fort”, he would respect it with unnecessary seriousness. This made him look silly. Even though he could recognise everyone he always shouted “Halt! Who goes there?”. This demonstrated his continuous nature of following the rules. Roger also took care of the “Chief’s” dirty work. He was the one who killed Piggy, letting Jack take all the credit and the power for it. This was comparable with a king having someone executed by others to show his own power. In this case, Roger was almost like Jack’s personal
executer.

Apart from leaders and followers, visionaries were people who saw things differently. They seemed calmer than the others, maybe due to a lack of fear or a presence of rationality. When visionaries put their information in order, they could predict events in the future. They were comparable to scientists. Simon was the perfect example on the island. Out of all the boys, he had the biggest lack of fear. While the tribe was haunted by the idea of a “beastie” in the jungle, all that Simon could see was a calm, pleasant forest in which the author described “bright fantastic birds” and “honey-coloured sunlight” .These descriptions were physical rationalities that the other boys could not see. Another logical event that occurred to Simon was to realise that the “beastie” on the top of the mountain was only a powerless dead body. Ironically, he was killed while trying to explain that to the others. In a mysterious way, Simon could also see into the future. He told Ralph “I just think you’ll get back all right”, where he used the word “you” instead of “we”. Simon somehow saw that he was going to die and that Ralph was going to get rescued. Later in the book, while hallucinating a conversation with the Lord of the Flies, he heard the head saying “we shall do you”. This foreshadowing not only came from Simon himself, but it became true very soon. His own death proved him being a visionary.

To conclude, all the three characters fit their roles very well. William Golding described each one of them in a way that is very comparable with people in the real world: Ralph as an ideal leader, Roger as a soldier, and Simon as a scientist. Being scaled down to the population of an island with young children instead of adults, the darkness in a man’s heart is seen in a clear and obvious way.