The entrance guards serve another purpose as well — to protect the tribe from the beast. Jack tells his tribe that they did not, in fact, kill the beast, just beat it as it came in disguise. Therefore, they still need to appease it and be on the alert. He prescribes their reality now as he had dictated their dreams and emotions in the previous chapter. This technique for truth control is standard in tyrannical regimes. Because none of the boys want to admit their participation in the “obscene” dance, they allow Jack to dictate their reality. They find comfort in his overbearing authority, as if he can protect them from their indefinable fears through strength of his personality alone. More concretely, Jack offers them the protection of weaponry and an instinct for warfare. When Roger sees the boulder that stands ready to crush interlopers at the entrance to Castle Rock, he deems Jack “a proper chief” because he’s got weaponry, the makings of war.
For a sadist like Roger, joining the tribe offers him the chance to unleash his cruelty amidst Jack’s reign of “irresponsible authority.” All his life, Roger has been conditioned to leash or mask his impulses, as evidenced by his inability to actually hit Henry with the stones in Chapter 4. Hearing that Jack has had Wilfred arbitrarily bound and left to wait hours for punishment strikes a responsive chord in Roger. By the end of the next chapter, he carves out a distinct niche in the tribe as the hangman, the torturer who plays a key role in all dictatorships.
