What is an example of a pathetic fallacy that shows fear in Golding's Lord of the Flies?

The word "pathetic" is often, hastily, interpreted as a value judgment, implying that something is weak or inferior, mostly because this is the way the word is commonly used in language today. However, it has etymological roots in the term "pathos," which simply means feeling, emotion or sentiment. In rhetoric, pathos is the means by which we recognize and appeal to the emotions of the audience, and lies in contrast to logos, or logic, which...

The word "pathetic" is often, hastily, interpreted as a value judgment, implying that something is weak or inferior, mostly because this is the way the word is commonly used in language today. However, it has etymological roots in the term "pathos," which simply means feeling, emotion or sentiment. In rhetoric, pathos is the means by which we recognize and appeal to the emotions of the audience, and lies in contrast to logos, or logic, which deals strictly in facts. A "pathetic fallacy," therefore, is not a "pitiful mistake," but the misattribution of emotions, typically to an inanimate object or animal. For example, assuming that predators are angry and vicious, or that the sea or a mountain could be cruel and uncaring.

There are no cases where the boys attribute fear to inanimate objects on the island, although they do seem to attribute fear to the pigs when they are being hunted on a few occasions, particularly the piglet that Jack hesitates over killing in Chapter 2. However, pathetic fallacies that "show fear" could easily reveal fear that the boys feel, rather than fear attributed to another. In this interpretations, we can see many occasions of such;

• Simon hallucinates a cruel omniscience to the Lord of the Flies (the pig's head) which mockingly comforts him over his fears of social rejection.


• The ocean, on the far side of the island, reflects Ralph's increasing sense of isolation and desperation. The ocean seems to be completely indifferent to them, while simultaneously operating as their greatest true threat. Ralph is afraid they're going to die on the island. 


• The Beast is an embodiment of fear. One aspect of the Beast that the boys generally fail to recognize is the fact that it becomes progressively more powerful and unbelievable to the rational mind as the story goes on; first it was a 6-year-old's nightmare, and by the end, it has become an inscrutable, sea-dwelling, child-eating ghost. In a sense, the boys actually need the Beast, as a means of giving their fears a name, and the fact that it grows more powerful is a means of allowing it to continue to exist each time it is "proven" to be nonexistent.