Lord of the Flies Chapter 3 Summary

Time has passed, and as Chapter Three opens, we see Jack, his bare back a “mass of dark freckles and peeling sunburn.” He is naked (what do you know) except for a pair of tattered shorts.
Jack has become obsessed with killing a pig. Obsessed to the point of tracking down pig’s droppings.
Based on his sniffing the air all the time, it seems that Jack is now a lot like an animal himself, or at the least a primitive form of man.
Jack fails to catch a pig, yet again.
He tries to take it out on someone else, meaning Ralph and Simon, who are trying to build shelters out of leaves.
It’s not going so well, as you might have expected.
So Ralph and Jack do what they always do together: argue. Jack thinks it’s more important to kill things, while Ralph thinks it’s more important to not die of exposure.
Ralph makes the argument that everyone is still scared of the beastie.
He says that the children are scared “As if it wasn’t a good island.” This is an interesting line to sticky-note along with that earlier one.
Jack, too, admits he gets a little scared when he’s in the jungle alone.
Despite all this, Ralph is still mostly concerned with the fire.
Jack suggests they could paint their faces. We suggest you flip back to that part about the brightly-colored bird.
And the point of painting faces is that they could sneak up on the pigs while they’re sleeping.
Piggy lies on his stomach and stares at the water. But he does point out that Simon is the one helpful guy, whenever he’s not missing, which he tends to be quite frequently.
OK, camera swivel; now we’re looking at Simon as he walks into the forest “with an air of purpose.” We are told that his “bright eyes” made Ralph think he was “delightfully gay and wicked,” when in fact he is not. He is also tan, barefoot, and has “a coarse mop of black hair.”
The littluns follow after him, and he helps them pick fruit too tall for them to reach before heading deeper into the jungle by himself.
Simon comes to a place where “the creepers had woven a great mat that hung at the side of an open space in the jungle.”
He crawls inside this space (we cannot imagine why) and chills out there while evening approaches, musing non-specifically.

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