Lord of the Flies

[hottcheer3]

What is the significance of the title?

[puttycake]

It's one of the translations of the name Beelzebub, one of the demons cast out of heaven along with Lucifer. His main aim was to make men worship demons as if they were God.

[delboy3]

(This was in the original film anyway): after killing the pig, the hunter boys stuck its head on a stake and left it in the middle of the jungle. This of course attracted flies to it and acted as both a 'totem' to the hunters and a warning marker to the rest of the boys who didn't want to join the hunter gang. Very symbolic I seem to remember...

There were also a lot of flies in The Amityville Horror, symbolising evil

[Aschenbach]

As alredy mentioned, the Lord of the Flies is the bloody, severed sow�s head that Jack impales on a stake in the forest glade as an offering to the beast. This complicated symbol becomes the most important image in the novel when Simon confronts the sow�s head in the glade and it seems to speak to him, telling him that evil lies within every human heart and promising to have some �fun� with him. (This �fun� foreshadows Simon�s death in the following chapter.) In this way, the Lord of the Flies becomes both a physical manifestation of the beast, a symbol of the power of evil, and a kind of Satan figure who evokes the beast within each human being. Looking at the novel in the context of biblical parallels, the Lord of the Flies recalls the devil, just as Simon recalls Jesus.

[jenstar]

I always thought it was an allusion to King Lear, but it's not mentioned in the Wikipedia article.