Why is the book titled Lord of the Flies?

The title Lord of the Flies refers to the severed pig’s head that becomes a symbol of the beast and the savage violence inside the boys themselves.

The phrase "lord of the flies" is a nickname for Beelzebub, a demon figure from the New Testament of the Bible. In the novel, Jack’s hunters kill a sow, cut off its head, put it on a sharpened stick, and leave it as an offering to the beast. Flies gather around the head, and Simon, who has already suspected that the beast may be something more metaphorical within the boys, encounters it in the forest. In his exhausted, visionary state, the pig’s head seems to speak to him and declares, “We are going to have fun on this island!” That "fun" means giving in to appetite, fear, violence, and the desire to dominate without the restraint of rules or civilization.

The novel's title is significant because the boys spend much of the novel imagining the beast as an outside monster: a snake-thing, a sea creature, or the dead parachutist on the mountain. Simon understands the deeper truth: that the real beast is the boys’ own capacity for brutality. Jack’s tribe thinks it is appeasing the beast by offering the pig’s head, but the offering actually shows how fully they have begun to worship violence.

Lord of the Flies is named for the pig’s head because it becomes the clearest image of the novel’s central fear: that civilization is fragile, and that the evil the boys dread is already inside them. The title connects their island rituals to a devilish power while keeping that power rooted in ordinary human cruelty.