Jack Merridew, the Lord of Misrule
What, exactly, was the appeal of "Lord of the Flies" antagonist?
Jack Merridew is a bully. He torments Piggy, calling him names and turning the other boys against him. Jack Merridew is a tyrant. He seizes power from Ralph, who was elected chieftain by the other boys, and proceeds to institute a reign of terror. Jack Merridew is a monster. He causes the death of two of the boys stranded on the island in Lord of the Flies.
But how did Jack get his power in the first place? He isn’t elected leader, but when he forms his own tribe, most of the boys will end up abandoning Ralph and joining him of their own free will. Jack holds a dark appeal to the other boys: he is a Dionysian Lord of Misrule, making a paradoxical offer of freedom through tyranny.
In her book Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia presents her version of the Apollonian/Dionysian split. In her view, the Apollonian is ordered, masculine, individual and tyrannical, while the Dionysian is chaotic, feminine, anonymous and democratic. But the Dionysian is the blurrer of boundaries, and is not so easily categorized. Masculine, militaristic Jack imposes a tyranny in which enjoyment is the whole of the law, in which everyone goes about masked, and the rational is subsumed to the emotional; his offer of fun is too primal for the other boys to resist.
The democracy that the boys seek to create at the start of the novel is distinct from the Dionysian mob; it is deeply ordered, requiring rules and regulations for it to be properly maintained, as witnessed with the assemblies and the conch. But tyranny, paradoxically, is ruleless; things are done at the whim of the dictator. Jack reigns via commands, not rules. When he orders Wilfred beaten, even Roger, the most brutal of the boys, finds it arbitrary. Under Ralph’s rule, there is a clear goal - rescue via maintaining the fire, while under Jack’s, everything is subordinated to an indistinct ‘fun.’ Jack never wins a vote against Ralph; when he challenges Ralph’s rule, the boys still vote against him, and Jack leaves to make his own tribe. His ultimate appeal to the boys is visceral and emotional: he offers them meat, as his tribe is successfully able to catch and kill a pig, and says "Listen all of you. Me and my hunters, we're living along the beach by a flat rock. We hunt and feast and have fun. If you want to join my tribe come and see us. Perhaps I'll let you join. Perhaps not."
That is Jack’s continuous offer to the other boys: fun. Jack’s hunting is a form of play; Ralph even complains that Jack enjoys hunting, while he doesn’t enjoy having to build huts. When Jack criticizes Ralph’s leadership, he says that Ralph can’t hunt or sing; the two activities are both parallel forms of fun. Jack’s tribe feasts and dances; Ralph’s tribe bathes and attempts to maintain the fire. While Ralph finds Jack’s overweening attempts to get meat unnecessary, he might not be right - eating only fruit makes the boys sick. The boys need meat. They need something to do. They need fun.
Jack’s tribe is a mob, the Dionysian destroyer of identities. But it also offers an identity to everyone who joins - the savage, exemplified in Jack as the Lord of Misrule, as a status to be sought. Jack’s identity is elevated even as it subsumes everyone else’s. From the very beginning, Jack is the most distinct of the boys. He is one of only two boys given a last name - and Percival Wemys Madison, by the end of the novel, has forgotten not only his last and middle names, but his first name too. Jack’s embrace of Dionysian masks only makes him more noticeable. When Jack makes his appeal to Ralph’s tribe, he is “stark naked save for paint and a belt.” Despite this, he is “safe from shame or self consciousness behind the mask of his paint and could look at each of them in turn.” The mask he wears, ironically enough, allows him to fully reveal himself. And revealed he is: later on, when Ralph goes to confront him over his theft of Piggy’s glasses, Jack is identifiable through the war paint by both his red hair and his personality. The transformation into a savage was not, for Jack and his tribe, a regression. At the start of the novel, he is described as “tall, thin, and bony; and his hair was red beneath the black cap. His face was crumpled and freckled, and ugly without silliness.” By the end, he has grown tall and muscular, perhaps even more so than Ralph. And even Ralph is jealous of Jack’s tribe; when he goes to confront Jack about the theft of Piggy’s glasses, he is jealous of how the ‘savages’ have tied their hair back, and wishes he had done the same. This is even after he had fallen for Jack’s allure, joining with other boys in a mock hunt that ended in the death of Simon.
It would be easy, then, to blame Jack for the disasters that befall the island, to mark the Lord of Misrule as the Lord of the Flies who brings about civilization’s end. But it is not so simple. As the decapitated pig’s head - which is called both the Beast and the Lord of the Flies says to Simon: “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?”
The flaws in the boys’ attempt at democracy are apparent from the start. One of the younger boys - called “litteuns” by the older children - with a mulberry colored birthmark goes missing very early on; his fate is never actually revealed. Ralph is elected chieftain, but not for any leadership quality - he’s just the tallest. And after his election he’s not particularly democratic, expecting his orders to be followed without question. The rules about speaking at an assembly - you have to be holding the conch - are routinely ignored. Early on, a primitive division of labor is instituted, with Jack and his choir becoming hunters - the more typically masculine role - and Ralph and the rest working on shelters. But Ralph is unable to organize the boys, and the shelters are built slowly and ineffectually. As time goes by, the reason for having all of these rules - maintaining the signal fire so they can be rescued - becomes obscured. The fire becomes a sort of fetish object; even Ralph forgets why it is important that it be kept lit.
And democracy had failed the boys before they even landed on the island. It is hinted early on that the novel is set during some sort of world war that has culminated in a nuclear exchange. The boys’ imitation of adults did not keep them safe - it led them to the exact place it led the adults. When a captain arrives at the island at the end of the book, he finds the boys amusing, asking if they are playing war. He is shocked to learn that two boys have actually died (and one has probably died and been completely forgotten). He cannot believe a group of British boys - civilized boys - could descend into this savagery. But he shouldn’t be, as he’s already witnessed how civilization can turn to barbarism in his own adult life. The ship’s arrival can’t even be properly called a rescue, as it is unclear if the war is still ongoing and what sort of Britain the boys will be going back to.
Jack’s initial appeal to the boys is not built on fear. He does not start the rumor about the beast; it’s a rumor spread by the littleuns, and he is fairly skeptical of it. Ralph starts to believe in the existence of the Beast before Jack does, and even seems ready to accede his leadership position to him because of it. After Jack departs to form his own tribe, his initial plan is to simply ignore the Beast, or to offer it a sacrifice. It is not until Simon’s death that he has any particular fervor about the Beast’s existence, and by then he had already won the allegiance of most of the boys. Ralph and Piggy try to blame Jack for the island’s problems, making him their scapegoat, before Jack does the same to Ralph in the boy’s final hunt.
Jack does not bear sole responsibility for the deaths that happen on the island. Everyone participates in Simon’s death - even logical Piggy and democratic Ralph, neither of whom have any answer for what the boys did other than attempts at denial. It is Roger, not Jack, who kills Piggy by pushing the rock onto him, and he does not do so at Jack’s command. Jack does order the hunt to kill Ralph - the Lord of Misrule is certainly not a figure of good - but all the boys except Sam and Eric are willing participants. Jack unleashed something, perhaps unwittingly, that was inside of them the entire time, just as the pig’s head said. And it is the holocaust of ecstasy and freedom that Jack unleashes that calls the ship to the island, bringing the boys’ possible rescue. Jack caused the boys to miss a ship via his negligence earlier, when he let the signal fire go out - but given that it takes the conflagration of the entire island to draw the attention of a ship, one has to wonder if it would’ve even mattered.
Within Lord of the Flies, democracy fails, and has already failed. Apollonian order degrades into a set of meaningless rituals and stifling rules, followed even as their original purpose is forgotten and the hope for rescue - perhaps always illusory - begins to fade. So the ultimate appeal of Jack Merridew - the lure of the Lord of Misrule - is not that he will protect us from an outside enemy. It is that he will unleash us to be what we truly are and do what we truly want, under cover of night, our faces painted in blood, while the world crumbles all around us.