End of the Lord of the Flies

The very end of the Lord of the Flies was filled with hypocrisy and irony. The novel was wrapped up in a bittersweet note with a naval officer rescuing the boys. "We saw your smoke. What have you been doing? Having a war or something?" (Golding 206). Here, the officer confronts Ralph and lightly jokes about the way they were noticed and rescued. It's ironic because the fire Jack set was meant to smoke him out and kill him, but instead it ended up rescuing the boys. "I should have thought that a pack of British boys... would have been able to put up a better show than that..." (Golding 207). This is also another example of irony, since the officer is criticizing the boys when he himself is coming from an adult world filled with war and violence. "The officer inspected the little scarecrow in front of him. The kid needed a bath, a haircut, a nose-wipe, and a good deal of ointment" (Golding 206). Here, the officer is analyzing Ralph as if everything were under ordinary circumstances. It's ironic in the sense that Ralph has just come from a run for his life, while having survived on an island for months, perhaps, and has watched two of his friends be murdered. The entire officer-Ralph confrontation at the end of the novel is ironic and touched with hypocrisy.