When Jack tries to convey his experience of the beast, he meets with resistance from Ralph. As the representative of reasonable society, Ralph is “incredulous and faintly indignant” that Jack could be granting any credit to the idea of a beast. Ralph is either unable or unwilling to acknowledge the existence of a beast. In contrast, the mystic visionary Simon is “intent” on understanding how Jack’s feeling corresponds with the intuitive knowledge Simon has of human nature. Like the littluns, Jack’s sense of the beast is formless and inarticulate; his domain is the emotions, which rule and fuel his animal nature. In truth, Jack is being hunted, in a sense, and both he and Simon, to varying degrees, recognize this. Ralph can’t acknowledge this and continue to believe in what he believes in and relies on: the basic civility of man.
This chapter reveals Simon as the mystic. While Golding doesn’t specify why Simon has a secret place or what he does there, clearly Simon feels the need to be sheltered from the other boys. “He’s queer. He’s funny,” says Ralph of his only work partner, which is the reaction mystics typically provoke from mainstream society. Simon is different from the other boys not only due the physical frailty of fainting spells but also in his consistently expressed concern for the other more vulnerable boys. In the previous chapter, he sticks up for Piggy when Jack verbally attacks him for not gathering firewood, pointing out that the fire was started with Piggy’s glasses. In this chapter, Simon takes the time to pluck from the trees the choice fruits that the littluns can’t reach and passing them down “to the endless, outstretched hands,” an almost saintly image.
