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The naval officer appears in the last few pages of the book when he lands on the deserted island and ultimately rescues the surviving boys, and Ralph from death at their hands. His appearance in the novel may be brief, but he makes possible the novel’s uneasy resolution. The suddenness of the officer’s appearance renders his character a deus ex machina, or an improbable or unexpected device or character that suddenly appears to resolve a situation, and while his arrival brings rescue, it also brings an unwelcome clarity for the boys. Symbolic of the world of law and order, the presence of an adult lays bear the extent to which the boys have allowed their own barbaric instincts to spiral out of control; Ralph suddenly becomes aware of how filthy he is.
However, the naval officer’s presence also reminds the reader that the boys’ situation, while a surprise to the naval officer, is a microcosm of the real world, and therefore no surprise at all. The officer symbolizes civilization, and the law and order of a civilized society, but the text suggests that civilization and barbarity are closely linked. The naval officer mistakes the boys’ frenzied attempt to hunt and kill Ralph for “fun and games,” indicative of the extent to which war has been normalized. When the officer realizes the boys have descended into such blatant savagery, he expresses disappointment because he believes British boys, thought to be the height of civility, should have been able to “put up a better show than that,” which highlights his hypocrisy and ignorance; the fact is the boys are indeed a product of the society in which they were raised, and that society is, stripped of the mask of so-called civility, inherently barbaric. He mentions “the Coral Island,” referencing an 1857 novel of the same name by R.M. Ballantyne about a group of shipwrecked schoolboys that was popular in primary school classrooms and emphasized the superiority of Europeans and the importance of imperialism. Golding wrote Lord of the Flies as a direct response to The Coral Island, and the naval officer’s appearance in Chapter 12 drives home the point that civilization isn’t actually all that civilized; as Ralph weeps about “the darkness of man’s heart,” the officer turns away, embarrassed by this display of emotion, to look instead upon his “trim cruiser” (that is, his warship), suggesting both that he prefers war to the sight of Ralph’s tears and that the barbarity of the war-prone adult war awaits them just off-shore.
