In Lord of the Flies, Golding uses a third person omniscient narrator to tell his story. The distance this narrator has from the events of the story helps to create a tone of both unflinching directness and of haunting beauty.
For example, when the hunters kill Simon, mistaking him for the beast, the narrator uses simple, straight-forward language:
"the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck,...
In Lord of the Flies, Golding uses a third person omniscient narrator to tell his story. The distance this narrator has from the events of the story helps to create a tone of both unflinching directness and of haunting beauty.
For example, when the hunters kill Simon, mistaking him for the beast, the narrator uses simple, straight-forward language:
"the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore" (pg 153)
Later, when Ralph is being hunted, the same language comes out:
"Break the line.
A tree.
Hide, and let them pass.
[...]
Hide was better than a tree because you had a chance of breaking the line if you were discovered.
Hide, then" (pg 217)
In these examples, the narrator's direct look at the evils the boys are unleashing creates a tone of unflinching observation.
At other moments in the novel, the narrator uses beautiful imagery to evoke the sense of evil and foreboding that haunts the boys and the island itself. Lines like the following, describing the pig's head and the forest (respectively) demonstrate this:
"The head remained there, dim-eyed, grinning faintly, blood blackened between the teeth" (pg 137)
and
"for a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter" (pg 143).
These quotes show that the distance the third person narrator has to the action of the story allows him/her to poetically contemplate the evil that the boys themselves are in direct struggle with.
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