Intro
What does a normal group of kids do when they find themselves stranded on a desert island? Build rafts? Ferment coconuts? Look for The Others? In the case of William Golding's novel The Lord of the Flies, they form a mini-society, led by the intrepid but slightly power-hungry Ralph. At first the boys work together to fight for survival, but hey—they're far from authority, don't have any rules to keep them in check, and don't even have Mom around to tuck them in—things are bound to go downhill. Some of the boys begin running wild, picking fights, attacking each other and destroying the fragile, pre-teen peace that reigned at the beginning of the story. Someone here really needs a time-out.
So what would we structuralists say about these boys gone wild in a faraway island? Well, we might look at how The Lord of the Flies functions as an "allegory," a narrative with a hidden political or moral meaning—i.e., these crazy kids in their dysfunctional island society represent the problems of regular, grown-up society too. Think Animal Farm, but little boys instead of barnyard animals. We could also look at character. Ever heard of archetypes? A literary archetype is a general type of a character who recurs over and over in literature. The "hero" figure is an archetype. The "villain" figure is another archetype. Structuralists are way into archetypes because they show up so often and in so many kinds of literature. What would a structuralist have to say about that? But of course—archetypes must represent an element of the deep structure of literature.
So, in the case of The Lord of the Flies, the novel reflects many of those classic archetypes. Ralph, the novel's protagonist, represents the hero archetype. The troublemaker Jack, Ralph's red-headed enemy, fits the archetype of the villain. There are other, less obvious archetypes in the novel, too. Piggy, a friend of Ralph's and the butt of a lot of the boys' jokes, represents the "scapegoat" archetype: he is a character who is made to bear the blame or punishment for a group's sins, or to suffer in their place.
Quote
The following passage demonstrates how Piggy fits into the scapegoat archetype. It is also kind of gory and—spoiler alert!—shows Piggy's gruesome demise at the hands of evil Jack and his cronies:
"Now Jack was yelling too and Ralph could no longer make himself heard. Jack had backed right against the tribe and they were a solid mass of menace that bristled with spears. The intention of a charge was forming among them; they were working up to it… Ralph stood facing them, a little to one side, his spear ready. By him stood Piggy still holding out the talisman, the fragile, shining beauty of the shell. The storm of sound beat at them, an incantation of hatred. High overhead, Roger, with a sense of delirious abandonment, leaned all his weight on the lever. Ralph heard the great rock before he saw it. He was aware of a jolt in the earth that came to him through the soles of his feet, and the breaking sound of stones at the top of the cliff. Then the monstrous red thing bounded across the neck and he flung himself flat while the tribe shrieked.
The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee; the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist. Piggy, saying nothing, with no time for even a grunt, traveled through the air sideways from the rock, turning over as he went. The rock bounded twice and was lost in the forest. Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across the square red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff came out and turned red. Piggy's arms and legs twitched a bit, like a pig's after it has been killed. Then the sea breathed again in a long, slow sigh, the water boiled white and pink over the rock; and when it went, sucking back again, the body of Piggy was gone. This time the silence was complete. Ralph's lips formed a word but no sound came." (William Golding, Lord of the Flies, 192-193)
Analysis
Piggy is marked as different from the other boys from the very beginning of the book. He's asthmatic, he's fat, he wears glasses. He's called Piggy. Even in his brutal death scene we see him associated with his animal namesake: the poor kid doesn't have time to "grunt" before he dies, and his arms and legs twitch like a "pig's after it has been killed." Also, the word scapegoat refers to an animal. And a pig is also an animal. Stretching it? Well sure, they eat out of separate troughs in the barnyard, but the physical association of Piggy with an animal here and throughout the novel reinforces his status as a scapegoat figure.
That status is also clear in the details of Piggy's rocky slaughter. We can tell that Piggy is powerlessness because even though he's holding the conch shell (meant to give whoever holds it the right to speak), the other boys shout in a "storm of sound" to drown him out. Plus, although Piggy and Ralph are isolated from the rest of the angry "tribe," Ralph survives the rock, but Piggy doesn't. It is Piggy who pays the price for the other boys' corruption. Punished for the bad behavior of the others, Piggy fits right into the scapegoat role—just one of the archetypes that structuralists look for in identifying the kinds of characters that exist in the deep structure of literature in general.