Lord of the Flies

The boys' descent into savagery reaches its climax when Simon, having discovered that the supposed "beast" is only the corpse of a dead parachutist, rushes down from the mountain to tell the others. He stumbles into the middle of a frenzied ritual dance being performed by Jack's tribe during a thunderstorm. Mistaking him for the beast in the chaos and dark, the boys—including Ralph and Piggy, who have joined the gathering—fall on Simon and beat him to death. His body is washed out to sea that night, and Ralph and Piggy privately try to convince themselves they were not really part of the killing.

Jack's tribe, now fully separated from Ralph's dwindling group, raids their camp at night and steals Piggy's glasses to use for making fire. Ralph, Piggy, and the twins Sam and Eric go to Jack's stronghold at Castle Rock to demand the glasses back. A confrontation erupts, and Roger—now essentially Jack's enforcer—deliberately levers a boulder off the rocks, killing Piggy instantly and destroying the conch shell, the last symbol of order and democratic authority. Ralph is attacked and barely escapes; Sam and Eric are captured and forced to join Jack's tribe.

Ralph, now hunted as the last holdout against Jack's rule, hides alone on the island. Sam and Eric, under duress, warn him that Jack's tribe intends to hunt him down and kill him, having sharpened a stick at both ends for the purpose. The next morning the tribe sets the island's forest ablaze in order to smoke Ralph out, and he flees for his life through the burning undergrowth, pursued by the painted, spear-carrying boys.

Just as Ralph collapses on the beach, cornered and expecting to die, he looks up to find a British naval officer standing over him—an adult drawn to the island by the smoke from the fire the boys started to kill him. The officer, seeing a group of dirty, half-savage children rather than the disciplined survivors he expected, is initially amused and then disturbed. Confronted with the reality of what they have done, Ralph breaks down and weeps for the first time in the novel, mourning the loss of innocence and the death of his friend Piggy, and the other boys begin crying as well. The officer, uncomfortable and moved by the scene, turns away to look at his warship waiting offshore, and the novel ends with the boys' rescue implied but their trauma and the horror of what has happened left unresolved and unspoken.