楊懿菡 (Sophie Yang)

October, 2010

Sovereignty, Exception, and Homo Sacer

in William Golding's Lord of the Flies

        Sometimes considered as an allegorical narrative of the darkness of human nature, William Golding's Lord of the Flies can also be seen as a novel about how human society is constructed. The novel presents many children who are stranded on an isolated island after encountering an airplane crash. Coming from civilized society, the children are trying to construct law and order on the primitive island. However, as the novel suggests, law and order do not work successfully on the island. On the contrary, the powers of human desires and inner fears take control of the whole island. Children who do not belong to the majority cannot survive in the story. Being considered as the outsiders of the newly formed society, these children will be killed as what Giorgio Agamben calls “homo sacer.”

In Lord of the Flies, one of the most interesting phenomena is that the three hominess sacri, Piggy, Simon, and Ralph are all closely connected with “the lord of the flies,” the head of the pig. The most apparent example is one boy being called “Piggy.” Whether deliberate or not, Golding seems to connect human beings with the beasts. Consider one of the most intriguing dialogues in the novel when Simon seems to hear the lord of the flies talking:

Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!” said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter. “You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? Close, close, close! I'm the reason why it's no go? Why things are what they are? (177)

What does it mean when the head says: “I'm part of you?” The author seems to suggest that the boundary between humans and beasts is indefinite. The most terrible beast is within humans' hearts. Examining the homo sacer in the novel, this paper aims to discuss the construction of the society, the shifting of sovereignty, and the role of homo sacer in Lord of the Flies according to Agamben's theory.

        With Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben discusses the constitution of the state of society and the place of the individual within it. The relationship between sovereignty, exception and homo sacer is an important issue in the book. Besides that, however, the concept of “biopolitics” is the foundation of Agamben's theories because he connects it closely with modern politics: modern society has the quality of biopolitics in which the distinction between “bios” and “zoe” is blurred:

what characterizes modern politics . . . is that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life—which is originally situated at the margins of the political order— gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction. (9)

Back in the Greek times, the Greeks had already separated the conception of life into two terms: “zoe” and “bios.” Zoe indicates “the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods)” while “bios” presents “the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group” (1). In other words, “bios” already indicates the unique characteristic of human nature that is “politics.” Agamben pushes this idea farther:

Only a little later, after all, human politics is distinguished from that of other living beings in that it is founded, through a supplement of politicity [policita] tied to language, on a community not simply of the pleasant and the painful but of the good and the evil and of the just and the unjust. (2-3).

Human beings are different from other living creatures because they have the sense of “politics.”

Agamben in fact borrows the term “biopolitics” from Michel Foucault. He summarizes Foucault's idea of biopolitics in The History of Sexuality: “at the threshold of the modern era, natural life begins to be included in the mechanisms and calculations of State power, and politics turns into biopolitics” (3). Agamben agrees with Foucault that “power penetrates subjects' very bodies and forms of life” (5). Yet unlike Foucault, who asserts that biopolitics emerges after sovereignty, Agamben contends that “biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception” (6). That is why he claims “It can also even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (6). By controlling people's everyday life, Sovereign attains to power.

Sovereignty has the power to suspend and cease the law in an urgent situation by creating the state of exception. For example, in Roman times, the Senate had the ability to force the law to come to a standstill in “iustutium,” which means a state of emergency. Therefore, “the sovereign, having the legal power to suspend the validity of the law, legally places himself outside the law” from which a paradox is created because “I, the sovereign, who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law” (15), which also echoes with what Agamben argues: “The paradox of sovereignty consists in the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order” (15). The example of the Senate indicates Agamben's concept of “potentiality.” Agamben considers that the characteristic of sovereignty is its potentiality. It can remain in the potential state and does not need to “pass into actuality” (28). That is why the Senate has its strong power to suspend the law, whether in the Roman Republic or in the Roman Empire.

In Agamben's theories, the secret of power is in the occupying and capturing of the exception. Quoting from Carl Schmitt, Agamben agrees with his idea that “authority proves itself not to need law to create law . . . The exception is more interesting than the regular case. The latter proves nothing; the exception proves everything” (qtd. Agamben16). What is an exception? An exception is “a kind of exclusion,” yet it is not “absolutely without relation to the rule” (17), which means it is not totally “chaos that precedes order but rather the situation that results from its suspension” (18). The “exception” is “the condition of being included through an exclusion, of being in relation to something from which one is excluded or which one cannot fully assume” (26-27). Clearly, the exception is the state which is neither here nor there, it is in between. Just because of its vagueness, it provides more room for discussion.

Another peculiar quality of exception is its paradox: “it cannot be defined either as a situation of fact or as a situation of right, but instead institutes a paradoxical threshold of indistinction between the two” (18). Exception is not a situation of fact and right because it can only be created through the “suspension of the rule;” it is tentative. Interestingly, the importance of exception is just revealed by nothing but its ambiguity:

In this case, the sovereign exception is the fundamental localization (Ortung), which does not limit itself to distinguishing what is inside from what is outside but instead traces a threshold (the state of exception) between the two, on the basis of which outside and inside, the normal situation and chaos, enter into those complex topological relations that make the validity of the juridical order possible. (19)

The meaning of ban is exactly the elaboration of the situation of exception: therefore, “The relation of exception is a relation of ban” (28) because “He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable” (28). It is hard to decide whether the man who is banned is “outside or inside the juridical order” (29), which causes the ambiguity.

A life totally under the power of sovereignty is what Agamben names the “bare-life.” The concept of homo sacer is tightly related to the concept of bare-life and biopolitics. In fact, homo sacer is the vital manifestation of his philosophical conception of sovereignty and exception. In the archaic Roman law, there is a punishment called “homo esto.” If any man committed “homo esto,” he is called a “homo sacer.” Pompeius Festus defines it as:

The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide; in the first tribunitian law, in fact, it is noted that “if someone kills the one who is sacred according to the plebiscite, it will not be considered homicide.” This is why it is customary for a bad impure man to be called sacred. (qtd. Agamben 71)

Homo Sacer is like the werewolf which “had to remain in the collective unconscious as a monstrous hybrid of human and animal, divided between the forest and the city—the werewolf—is, therefore, in its origin the figure of the man who has been banned from the city” (105). He is the one who is banned and abandoned from the society. He can keep living or be killed. Facing homo sacer, everybody has the same power as sovereignty does. In one sense, as Ward W. Fowler reveals, “Sacer esto is in fact a curse; and homo sacer on whom this curse falls is an outcast, a banned man, tabooed, dangerous” (qtd Agamben 79). Therefore, it is “a threshold of indistinction and of passage between animal and man, physis and nomos, exclusion and inclusion: the life of the bandit is the life if the loup garou, the werewolf, who is precisely neither man nor beast, and who dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to neither” (105).

        Homo sacer, moreover, is put into exception, into the edge or reduced to the state of bare life. A homo sacer is someone who is abandoned from both the divine law and the human law because the life of homo sacer cannot be sacrificed; therefore he does not belong to the divine law (ius divinum). On the other hand, anyone who kills him would not be punished; therefore, he does not belong to the human law (ius humanum) either. A homo sacer is someone who is totally under the control of the judicial law belonging to sovereignty. In other words, sovereignty has the authority to suspend both the divine law and the human law and, hence takes total control of human lives. As a result, the lives of human beings are like lives naked before sovereignty. Everyone has the potentiality of being treated as a homo sacer. In this sense, the life of a homo sacer is indeed a life of a bare-life.

Homo sacer, like the rule of the sovereign, is paradoxical because s/he is someone who “may be killed but not sacrificed” (83). Actually the word “sacer” itself also has two meanings. From the etymology of Latin, “Sacer designates the person or a thing that one cannot touched without dirtying oneself or without dirtying; hence the double meaning of ‘sacred' or ‘accursed'” (qtd. Agamben 79). Homo sacer and sovereignty actually share more similarities besides the fact that both are paradoxical:

Here the structural analogy between the sovereign exception and sacratio shows its full sense. As the two extreme limits of the order, the sovereign and homo sacer presents two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially hominess sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns. (84)

In the example of homo esto and homo sacer, it is apparent that the judicial law is more powerful than the divine and human law. Before sovereignty, people are all the same; therefore, it can be said that the ultimate goal of sovereignty is to control exception and the bare-life within it.

Though it sounds rather hard to achieve, yet homo sacer in the state of exception might provide hope and opportunity for the whole system because:

When its borders begin to be blurred, the bare life that dwelt there frees itself in the city and becomes both subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, the one place for both the organization of State power and emancipation from it. (9)

Just because being put into the border, into the extreme, human beings serving as homo sacer might have the potentiality to seek an opportunity, to see something normal people who are within sovereignty cannot see. Unfortunately, after all, homo sacer most of the time is just a scapegoat for sovereignty. Sovereignty needs to extricate something in order to retain its unity. In that sense, both Jesus Christ and millions of Jews who suffered in the holocaust are good manifestations.

Lord of the Flies is a novel in which we can apply in interesting ways Agamben's theories of sovereignty, exception, and homo sacer, because the children on the isolated island actually attempt to construct society by using different powers that are analogous to that of sovereignty. One group is trying to create sovereignty based on reason and order, only to be defeated by another rising sovereignty that resorts to human desires and inner fears. Trying to control unperceivable fear, the sovereignty of Jack is equal to the control of the state of exception, because the one who can control exception is the one who possesses the real power. Controlling human desires, such as for food, and various fears of the group are not enough, as mentioned above: sovereignty needs to extricate something in order to retain its unity; therefore, creating homo sacer becomes important and is indeed the key strategy of Jack's sovereignty. Within Ralph's rational sovereignty, there is no one, for example, killed; however, as the time of Jack's sovereignty unfolds, deaths begin to appear. Those children who are sacrificed can be seen as hominess sacri. They are sacrificed because they are deemed somehow different from the majority and thus by killing them, the sense of sovereignty achieves greater solidity and firmer standing because of the common enemy. By killing homo sacer, the children endorsing sovereignty do not fear for their own lives. Also they do not dare to disobey sovereignty.

In the process of Ralph and Piggy's efforts to establish their ideal society, the text appears to argue that the embodiment of power is essential to the construction of a functioning society. Ralph's possession of the conch is an embodiment of power. Ralph and Piggy personify civilization and rationality. Ralph is a healthy, strong and positive twelve-year-old boy, while on the contrary, Piggy is a weak and defective fat boy. He not only has asthma, but also congenital nearsightedness. Piggy's physical condition suggests that living in the wild is not suitable for him, and indicates his strangeness in comparison with the other boys. Ralph and Piggy are two important figures trying to bring civilized law and order into the island. Though Ralph is a natural leader, yet he cannot succeed without Piggy's help. Piggy, with no doubt, plays the role of Ralph's staff officer. Piggy is the one who first suggests having a meeting: ‘I expect we'll want to know all their names,' said the fat boy, ‘and make a list. We ought to have a meeting'” (16). When Ralph still appreciates the nature, Piggy keeps pushing him to do something: “‘we got to find the others. We got to do something'” (20). Piggy is the one who is good at logical reasoning and senses the urgency to reconstruct the civilization.

Piggy is actually more rational than Ralph, and it is also Piggy who gives power to the conch. When they find the conch, Piggy suggests, “‘we can use this to call the others. Have a meeting. They'll come when they hear us—'” (22). After Ralph blows the conch, the scattered children respond to the sound. From this point, the conch starts to represent power. When Piggy moves around the children, asking their names, the children “gave him the same simple obedience that they had given to the men with megaphones” (25).The children deem that Ralph has power and naturally Piggy, who seems to follow Ralph, also shares certain power. In this aspect, the use of the conch helps to construct a sense of a power great enough to form a society.

In the appearance of Jack and his group of chorus boys, Golding presents the power of groups and the establishment of rules as crucial issues throughout the novel. The introduction of the chorus is quite impressive: “Within the diamond haze of the beach something dark was fumbling along. . . . Then the creature stepped from mirage on to clear sand, and they saw that the darkness was not all shadow but mostly clothing” (26). The creature is the party of the chorus. The creature metaphor makes the boys seem like part of a bigger organization. The group of the boys is a unity. They dress in the same way: “each boy wore square black cap with a silver badge in it. Their bodies, from throat to ankle, were hidden by black cloaks which bore a long silver cross on the left breast and each neck was finished off with a hambone frill” (26). The boy who stands out, Jack, is the leader: “The boy who controlled them was dressed in the same way though his cap badge was golden. When his party was about ten yards from the platform he shouted an order and they halted, gasping, sweating, swaying in the fierce light” (26-27).

The narrator uses words such as “control” and “order” here. The novel always suggests that when a group is formed, there must be a leader to maintain the order by enforcing the rules. Distinguished from the others' silver badges, Jack's golden badge—like Ralph's conch—represents power. The relationship between human beings is unavoidably hierarchical. At first Piggy asks the names of the children spiritedly, but when he observes the group's power, he becomes timid: “Piggy asked no names. He was intimidated by this uniformed superiority and the offhand authority in Merridew's voice. He shrank to the other side of Ralph and busied himself with his glasses” (28).

After Jack and Ralph meet, the children decide to choose a leader by voting. The action of voting suggests that the children still obey the law of civilized society. The act of casting votes is a custom that originates in civilized society as well as an important step toward the sense of law and order that Ralph and Piggy try to construct on the island. Yet most of the children do not understand what a vote really represents; they are attracted by the novelty of it: “This toy of voting was almost as pleasing as the conch” (30). Though Jack volunteers to be the chief, yet because he has Ralph as his opponent, he cannot help but accept the idea of having a vote. Ralph wins the vote because “there was a stillness about Ralph as he sat that marked him out: there was his size, and attractive appearance; and most obscurely, yet most powerfully, there was the conch” (30).At this point, the new leader creates a powerful sense of law and order.

After he becomes the leader, Ralph and his consulter Piggy try their best to preserve law and order on the island. Ralph starts to regulate rules for all the children. He claims: “We can't have everybody talking at once. We'll have to have ‘Hands up' like at school” (43). The new rule is that “I'll give the conch to the next person to speak. He can hold it when he's speaking” (43). Jack also supports Ralph by saying “‘We'll have rules!' he cried excitedly. ‘Lots of rules! Then when anyone breaks ‘em—'” (44). At this point, Jack supports Ralph because Ralph has empowered him as the hunter. The text dismisses the implication of the original “creature” of the chorus: thus, “The choir, noticeably less of a group, had discarded their cloaks” (42). The wording seems to suggest that “group” is rather a vague idea by the clear fact that now all the children belong to the group of Ralph. To exercise his power, Ralph starts to distribute tasks, for example asking the hunters to keep the fire and the others to bring water and build huts.

The society that Ralph rules unfortunately does not work out because the children refuse to obey the empty concept of law and order. Agamben's theory of sovereignty suggests that Ralph would fail to become the sovereign of the group, even though he tries desperately. The children, as a matter of fact, do not submit themselves to the rules. Take Jack's hatred towards Piggy as an example: one time Piggy wants to speak when he holds the conch, yet Jack retorts “The conch doesn't count on top of the mountain, so you shut up” (54). What is more, after Jack finishing hunting and going back to find Ralph, Ralph complains to him that “They're hopeless. The older ones aren't much better. D'you see? All day I've been working with Simon. No one else. They're off bathing, or eating, or playing” (64). The crisis of Ralph's superficial sovereignty is imminent. The artificial concept of law and order cannot function feasibly on the savage island, because rationality and cerebration cannot compete with the inner fear and natural desires of human beings.

Jack, on the contrary, forms his power by controlling human desires and inner fear. As soon as Jack hunts his first pig, the political situation of the island changes immediately. The unstable sovereignty of Ralph has gradually been overthrown. After he masters the art of hunting, Jack has no reason to listen to Ralph and follow his constructed civilized law. Jack has had the ambition to be the leader from the very start; therefore, it is not surprising that he wants to revolt and become the leader himself. Aside from controlling the source of food, Jack provides a solution to the collective fear of the children, which is to simply kill the monster (if it is concrete and can be killed) or to sacrifice the head of the pig to the monster (if it is invisible and he cannot kill it).

Unlike Ralph and Piggy, who do not believe in the existence of any monster, Jack understands and experiences the fear when he hunts in the forest:

“If you're hunting sometimes you catch yourself feeling as if—” He flushed suddenly.

“There's nothing in it of course. Just a feeling. But you can feel as if you're not hunting, but—being hunted; as if something's behind you all the time in the jungle.” (67)

Fear in fact can emerge in various forms; it can come from both inside and outside. The fear Jack is experiencing here can be explained as the smallness of human beings and the uncontrollable power of nature—the sinister environment of the island. The perception of the frightening power of nature is coherent with the devastation of Ralph's lawful, orderly and rational sovereignty (which perishes rather quickly).

Unlike Ralph's sovereignty, Jack's is irrational and dominated by violence. Switching from Ralph's sovereignty to Jack's is like a return to primitive society from civilization. Jack's group throws away the burden of civilization completely by resorting to animal instinct in order to survive, although there are some transitional processes. The reader might wonder about the question: if the children choose to abandon rationality at last, why do they obey civilized rules at first? The narrator does provide an explanation of why the little children obey the summons of the conch: “They obeyed the summons of the conch, partly because Ralph blew it, and he was big enough to be a link with the adult world of authority; and partly because they enjoyed the entertainment of the assemblies” (75).

As the passage indicates, the influence of authority of the civilized society is deeply rooted in the children's minds. Another similar example is Roger's not daring to throw the stones to the playing “littluns,” even though he wants to: “Rounding the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law. Roger's arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins” (78). Although they need time, the children sooner or later will refuse to obey the rules as long as they know there is no one to punish them.

Furthermore, when Jack learns to paint his face as aborigines do, he totally gives up the constraint of morality and civilization:

He looked in astonishment, no longer at himself but at an awesome stranger. . . . He began to dance and his laughter became a bloodthirsty snarling. He capered towards Bill, and the mask was a thing on its own, behind when Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness. (80)

The mask “compelled” them (80). Throwing away the burden of civilization, Jack's group hunts down a pig and Jack little by little starts to grasp power. Jack's power shows by his teasing of Piggy for not giving him meat to eat. Piggy, who cannot resist the temptation of meat, asks: “Aren't I having none?” (92). Seizing this chance, “Jack had meant to leave him in doubt, as an assertion of power; but Piggy by advertising his omission made more cruelty necessary” (92).

In Jack's sovereignty, out of fear and blindness, children become mad and start to kill certain children who they regard as outsiders. Those children are hominess sacri who “can be killed but not sacrificed.” The children's murder echoes Agamben's words, “the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially hominess sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns” (84). As mentioned earlier, Fowler argues that homo sacer is an “outcast, a banned man, tabooed, dangerous” (qtd Agamben 79). In other words, homo sacer is highly possible someone different from the majority, which means an outsider. All of the three hominess sacri, Simon, Piggy, and Ralph, fall into this category. They are banned from the majority intentionally and thus are indeed scapegoats. Yet noticeably Golding does present them differently: all three of them are thinkers and just because of that, they cannot agree with Jack's sovereignty, in which fear and desire dominate.

Simon, who is the first one to be killed, is a mysterious character. He is not only somewhat detached from the others, but also the only one who has communication with both the world of nature and the lord of the flies. No one understands Simon, and both Ralph and Jack consider him “queer and funny” (69). Piggy even once says that “he's cracked” (164). Simon always enters into the forests alone and does nothing. Simon does not belong to either Ralph or Jack's society; in that sense he is an outsider. He is also a prophet because he assures Ralph that he can go back to civilized society. Most importantly, when the lord of the flies is killed, Simon is there, although he just observes and does not join the killing. After cutting the head of the pig, Jack shouts out “This head is for the beast. It is a gift” (170) and then leaves. Simon stays there and has a most intricate and profound conversation with the head of the pig.

The conversation between Simon and the lord of the flies reveals the truth that terror actually is within people themselves. Simon seems to hear the head speaking to him: “You know, didn't you? I'm part of you?” (177). From this words, we may understand that Simon indentifies here with the sacrificial head. He is related to the sacrificial head because in the end he is killed because his society considers him a monster. The truth is that he intends to report to the crowd that the monster is actually a rotten human corpse. He is homo sacer because he dies as the substitute for the supposed monster. He is killed by the majority. The order of the society on the island dictates that those who kill him will not suffer punishment. Simon cannot be sacrificed because even though he identifies himself with the sacrificial head, he is not a pig, no matter what. No one talks about his death, and his sacrifice is sadly meaningless.

The second homo sacer is Piggy. The narrator has already told the reader that Piggy is an outsider; therefore, it is easy for him to become a target: “There had grown up tacitly among the bignus the opinion that Piggy was an outsider, not only by accent, which did not matter, but by fat, and ass-mar, and specs, and a certain disinclination for manual labour” (81). Even though Ralph is somehow close to him, he sometimes regards Piggy as a nuisance: “Piggy was a bore; his fat, his ass-mar, his matter-of-fact ideas were dull: but there was always a little pleasure to be got out of pulling his leg, even if one did it by accident” (81). Though Ralph at this point has not started to consider the merit and significance of Piggy, he will know eventually.

The text always seems to use Piggy as a medium to solve the embarrassment between Ralph and the boys. In Piggy and Ralph's second approach to Jack's group and their desire for meat, the boys tease Piggy:

At this moment the boys who were cooking at the fire suddenly hauled off a great chunk of meat and ran with it towards the grass. They bumped Piggy who was burnt, and yelled and danced. Immediately, Ralph and the crowd of boys were united and relieved by the storm of laughter. Piggy once more was the center of social derision so that everyone felt cheerful and normal. (184)

It is clear that Piggy so often becomes an outsider; no one respects him. The boys snatch his glasses to ignite the fire and pick on him to solve the embarrassment between them.By teasing Piggy, Jack, the sovereign, does show his power by not giving him meat to eat.

Finally, when Ralph and Piggy attempt to take back Piggy's stolen glasses, Roger kills him by pushing the huge rock from the cliff. The narrator compares Piggy's death with the pig's death: “The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee: the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist. . . . His head opened and stuff came out and turned red. Piggy's arms and legs twitched a bit, like a pig's after it has been killed” (222-23). In this aspect, Piggy is a homo sacer because any one who belongs to sovereignty has the right to kill him without punishment. Piggy cannot be sacrificed as well, because he is not a real pig which can be sacrificed to the monster.

The last homo sacer is Ralph. He becomes homo sacer and Jack hunts him because he was once the leader and naturally becomes an eyesore to the new leader.

After the death of Simon, Piggy and Ralph run away from the sovereignty of Jack. Yet, later, because Jack steals Piggy's eyeglasses at night, Jack and Piggy go to argue with him. However, Jack's group refuses to listen to reason. As soon as Jack sees Ralph entering into his territory, he shouts: “You go away, Ralph. You keep to your end. This is my end and my tribe. You leave me alone” (217). When the negotiation fails, Jack commands: “Grab them!” (220). Soon after Roger kills Piggy, Ralph starts his life in exile. There is no one in his sovereignty except himself. Thirsty and hungry, Ralph considers the possibility of reconciling with Jack's group, yet he knows that it is impossible: “Lying there in the darkness, he knew he was an outcast. ‘Cos I had some sense'” (228-29).

Ralph still possesses his sense of rationality and, as an enemy of Jack, lacks a place to live on the island: “These painted savages would go further and further, then there was that indefinable connection between himself and Jack; who therefore would never let him alone; never” (226). When Ralph approaches the castle on the rock, he encounters the twins who are performing their duties as guards. The twins whisper to him: “‘They hate you, Ralph. They're going to do you.' ‘They're going to hunt you to-morrow.'” (232). Ralph asks why, he says: “But I've done nothing…I only wanted to keep up a fire!” (232). The conversation ends when “Roger sharpened a stick at both ends” (234). The reader knows that the head of the pig is stuck at a sharp stick. The savage children try to kill Ralph in the same way they kill a pig.

The example of Ralph confirms that “anyone can become a homo sacer.” Although Ralph once was the sovereign of the island and respected by the children, when Jack snatches him, he becomes nothing. Simon and Piggy, though somewhat different from the other children, have once belonged to the majority. It is sovereignty's choice that makes them outsiders. All three of them are put into the state of exception and shoulder a sense of groundless sin. Interestingly, all the three hominess sacri are connected with the hog and are killed or die like the hog. The boundary between humans and beasts is vague and indistinct. In addition to the similarity between homo sacer and the hog, the “beast” that frightens the children exists in their minds. Golding seems to suggest that it is the evil within human's hearts that frightens the children as Jack feels in the jungle: “as if you're not hunting, but—being hunted; as if something's behind you all the time in the jungle'” (67). After all, there is no “monster” in the jungle; the “monster” they have seen is a human corpse.

Though the atmosphere of Lord of the Flies is quite cruel and dark, the example of Ralph, however, suggests an optimistic and hopeful side. Although Ralph receives the treatment of a homo sacer, he does not die. He is the one who experiences what other boys do not experience; therefore, he understands more: “Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy” (248). Yet, Ralph is not saved and can forget everything because the civilization to which he will return is not a paradise either. Ralph and the boys are saved by an officer, which suggests that the war is continuing. He still needs to face another war time that might be as dark as what he has experienced on the island.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. Print.

Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. 1955. New York: Capricorn, 1959. Print.