What is the “sign” that comes “down from the world of grownups”? What are its literal and figurative meanings?

At the end of Chapter 5, Ralph and Piggy lament about their situation and comment that they wish "grownups" were around because grownups "know things." Ralph says, "If only they could send us something grownup...a sign or something." (Golding 94) At the beginning of Chapter 6, an air battle takes place over the island while the boys are sleeping. During the battle, a paratrooper gets shot out of the sky and lifelessly floats...

At the end of Chapter 5, Ralph and Piggy lament about their situation and comment that they wish "grownups" were around because grownups "know things." Ralph says, "If only they could send us something grownup...a sign or something." (Golding 94) At the beginning of Chapter 6, an air battle takes place over the island while the boys are sleeping. During the battle, a paratrooper gets shot out of the sky and lifelessly floats to earth. The trooper's parachute cords get tangled in the canopy of the forest, and his dead body moves with the wind on top of the mountain. Golding utilizes dramatic irony by answering Ralph's request for a sign from the grownups with the corpse of a paratrooper. The paratroopers descend from the sky symbolizes Lucifer's fall from heaven. Later on in the novel, the dead paratrooper is mistaken for the "beast." The "beast" represents the inherent evil present in every human which correlates with Lucifer's nature. Literally, the "sign" from the grownups is the dead paratrooper, and figuratively the paratrooper symbolizes the existence of evil on the island and alludes to Lucifer's fall from heaven.