Although all the boys were guilty in Simon’s death, the other savages perceive Roger differently after Piggy’s death. Because he calmly and single-handedly kills someone, he is marked as a hangman, one who “wields a nameless authority.” Just as Ralph has an instinct for diplomacy and leadership, Roger has an instinct for torture. Without the “protection of parents and school and policeman and the law” which surrounded Henry in Chapter 4 and forced Roger to miss when he threw stones, Roger is free within Jack’s primitive subculture to make deadly contact.
Ralph seeks to remind the savages of those very constraints, to summon the conditioning voices of civilization that always warned them to play nice and share with others. At the assembly, he suggests that his group present an image of their former, civilized selves when approaching the savages. He wants to differentiate his group from Jack’s tribe, as if to remind them of what they’ve lost or tantalize them with what they could have if rescue is achieved. In contrast, Samneric want to put on paint, hoping for mercy through assimilation. They fear that reminding Jack of the constraints he’s now free of will only aggravate his abuse of power. “They’ll be painted! You know how it is.” Sadly, the twins turn out to be correct about the antagonizing effect of “otherness.” When Jack orders his boys to bind the twins, Samneric “protested out of the heart of civilization” with language that marks them as outsiders in this group, which has left behind such civilized verbal niceties as “Oh, I say!”
