What is the individual's role in society?
- Joanna Makowska
- 19 hours ago
- 5 min read
I mean: what are we to each other? A gear? A witness? A prop in someone else’s story? Or something quieter an excuse the group uses to feel coherent.
Society loves roles the way a stage loves costumes. They spare us the embarrassment of improvisation. If you are “the leader,” you speak. If you are “the clown,” you soften the room. If you are “the serious one,” you carry the weight so everyone else can pretend it isn’t there. The strange part is that we often put on these costumes without noticing. We do it the way you start using a new word after hearing it twice suddenly it’s in your mouth, and you can’t remember choosing it.
So the question becomes more awkward, more honest: do we play roles while knowing we have them?
I think we don't, although we learn to laugh at the right moments, to learn which truths are allowed at the table and which ones have to be taken to the bathroom mirror and swallowed with water. And then a crisis happens,a conflict, a fear and suddenly the role becomes invisibly visible. That’s why Lord of the Flies feels less like a story and more like an X-ray. Golding does something cruelly efficient: he removes the adult scaffolding, the official stamp that says “this is how we do things,” and he lets the boys rebuild society from scratch. We watch roles form the way you watch ice spread across a puddle.
Ralph becomes “the leader,” but not because leadership rises from his soul like a noble vapor. It rises because the group panics at formlessness. Jack becomes “the protector,” which is just a polite word for what fear really wants: power that can shout. It’s not that Jack invents violence; violence is already in the room, waiting for an excuse. The beast gives him the excuse. And suddenly the role that matters is not “the one who thinks” but “the one who can act,” which in a frightened crowd often means “the one who can hurt.” Piggy is the tragedy that society repeats with different costumes. He has knowledge. He has foresight. He has the kind of intelligence that should be valuable the way clean water is valuable. But the group doesn’t reward it with status. They reward strength, confidence, spectacle. So Piggy becomes what society always produces when it can’t metabolize difference: an outsider, then a target, then a scapegoat. He may even feel as if he has no role because nobody hands him a title but the absence of a title is not the absence of function. Sometimes “having no role” is simply the role of being the one others are allowed to ignore.
Golding places us in a strange double position: we identify with the boys, we understand hunger, fear, the need to belong and yet we also observe them like a case study. That tension quietly exposes something about our own lives: in society, we are both participants and observers, but our observation is contaminated by participation. We don’t see the water we swim in. We don’t notice how our “normal” choices keep certain systems normal. How silence becomes a vote. How laughter becomes consent.
If Wittgenstein is right that language has limits, then roles are one of the ways we manage those limits: we don’t have to articulate ourselves fully, we just perform the part that makes sense to the group. And Nietzsche’s bitter gift returns here too: even if we share the same words “responsibility,” “loyalty,” “strength” we may not mean the same thing at all. Society is full of shared vocabulary and unshared experience. A role is a way of pretending those mismatches don’t matter.
What Lord of the Flies shows, with a kind of clean brutality, is that roles aren’t only about personality. They’re about what the group rewards.
When the conch still has authority, Ralph’s role makes sense. When the conch loses authority, Ralph doesn’t just lose power he loses the social reality that made his role possible. Democracy is not a trait in a person; it’s an agreement in a crowd. Once the agreement dissolves, the “leader of order” becomes a relic, a joke, a boy holding a shell like a dead phone. And that’s the terrifying flexibility of roles: they shift when the rules shift. Roger is the clearest example. At first he is cruel in small ways (testing the edge of what he can do). Later, when punishment disappears and the group grows addicted to brutality, he becomes something like an enforcer, a hand the tribe uses to do what it no longer wants to call its own decision. In a stable society, perhaps Roger would have remained a quiet boy with dark impulses (no one). On the island, the island gives his impulses a job.
So when we ask “what is the individual’s role in society,” I don’t think the answer is a neat noun. The answer is a moving relationship: between the self and the group, between fear and order, between what we need and what we’re willing to sacrifice to get it.
And maybe the most disturbing suggestion in Golding is not that humans can become savage. That’s almost too easy, of course they can. The disturbing suggestion is that we can become savage without noticing, because society will supply us with reasons that feel like roles: protector, patriot, realist, loyal friend, good student, “just doing my job.” Labels that sound respectable enough to keep our conscience quiet.
Which leaves me with the question that if the boys didn’t fully know which roles they were playing, do we? Or do we only realize it the moment the role starts to hurt, when the script demands something we can’t stomach, when the group’s need becomes heavier than our own face?
Maybe the role of the individual is not to “fit” society. Maybe it is to notice it. To develop the kind of inner eyesight that can say, before the conch is smashed: “this is what we are doing to each other, and this is what it is turning us into.”
Page design: Asya Chub
Bibliography
Photos:
Arakcheyeva, Anastasia. “Lord of the Flies.” Behance, Oct. 2018, www.behance.net/gallery/71684627/Lord-of-the-Flies?tracking_source=search_projects. Accessed 14 Mar. 2026. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Virginia, Cathryn. “Lord of the Flies.” Behance, 2025, www.behance.net/gallery/19359651/Lord-of-the-Flies/modules/130803857. Accessed 14 Mar. 2026. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
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