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Allegory

An allegory is a narrative story that conveys a complex, abstract, or difficult message through symbolic meanings rather than direct statements. Allegories work by giving characters and events symbolic meanings beneath the surface story. Famous examples of allegories include Animal Farm, Aesop's Fables, and Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

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270 views

Allegory

An allegory is a narrative story that conveys a complex, abstract, or difficult message through symbolic meanings rather than direct statements. Allegories work by giving characters and events symbolic meanings beneath the surface story. Famous examples of allegories include Animal Farm, Aesop's Fables, and Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

Uploaded by

uptagrafftreneau
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Allegory FAQs (Simplified)

What is an allegory?
An allegory is a narrative story used to convey an abstract, complex, or dangerous
message.
How does an allegory work?
Allegory works by giving characters and events in the story symbolic meanings. As
readers, our attention remains on the surface story while a symbolic story plays out
beneath.
What are the different kinds of allegories?
When divided by tradition, allegories are biblical, classical, or modern. When divided by
literary device, allegories are personification allegories or symbolic allegories.

What is an allegory?

An allegory is a narrative story that conveys a complex, abstract, or difficult message. It


achieves this through storytelling. Rather than having to explain the pitfalls of arrogance
and the virtues of persistence, a writer can instead tell a tale about a talking tortoise and
a haughty hare.
Humans naturally gravitate toward good stories. Have you ever noticed how fiction gets
the most shelf space in the bookstore? Stories are compelling. By using a story to talk
about big, abstract, or difficult ideas, allegory takes advantage of our inclination toward
story.
Sometimes, the message a writer wants to convey is dangerous to talk about explicitly.
In these cases, allegory creates distance between the writer and the message. One
famous example of this is George Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm. Orwell used a story
line about farm animals to express his dissent toward the Russian government, a risky
subject to discuss outright.

Allegory as a literary device

Allegories are one of many literary devices that writers can use to show one thing and
say another. In this way, they are similar to but not the same as:
Metaphors: The length of a piece of writing is the easiest way to tell if you’re
reading allegory vs. metaphor. A metaphor is a brief literary device that assigns one
thing to another. An allegory is an entire story, complete with characters and narrative
arc.
Symbols: Like metaphor, symbols are typically singular. One thing represents a concept
or idea. Technically, an allegory is an expanded work of symbolism and employs
various symbols throughout its story.
Allusions: Allusion is a reference to a well-known person, character, place, or event that
the writer uses to pack a lot of meaning into a small space. If an allegory is widely
known, it might be referenced as an allusion in a piece of writing.
Fables: The term fable is often used as a synonym for allegory. The two terms overlap,
but they’re not completely interchangeable. Allegory is the broader of the two terms. It
encompasses fables, which are short-form allegories that use animals or nonhuman
characters to teach a specific lesson.
Anecdotes: Similar to allegory, anecdotes have a complete narrative structure. They are
short stories told to make a point. The difference is that anecdotes are true stories used
to exemplify a specific message, whereas allegories are mostly fictional tales that
convey broader meanings.

When are allegories used in writing?

Allegory gives the writer a chance to be creative while conveying an important


message. It isn’t speech writing, and it isn’t science class. With allegory, you can
employ personification, time travel, even magic if that suits your story. You have space
to create more complex characters using techniques like indirect characterization. The
important thing is that the story stands on its own and the underlying message is clear.
Effective allegory does not require explanation. Though sometimes, like with The
Tortoise and the Hare, the story begs for a schoolteacher’s voice to enter at the end and
say: “The moral of the story is . . . ” Yet even without a schoolteacher chiming in, we still
understand the point of the story.

Types of allegory

Allegory is most commonly sorted by the tradition it emerges from: biblical, classical, or
modern. Sometimes you’ll see it divided by the literary device it employs, such as
personification allegory or symbolic allegory.

Tradition
Biblical: Biblical allegory can refer to stories within the Bible that teach specific lessons
or to literature that retells lessons from the Bible. These usually appear as tales of good
vs. evil.
Classical: Classical allegories are stories that emerged from the classical period of
ancient Greece and Rome. Many of these allegories, such as Aesop’s Fables,
originated as oral stories that were later transcribed.
Modern: Allegory is a powerful way to hold a reader’s attention, and it continues to be
employed by writers to address modern concerns. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet
Letter, from 1850, is an allegory about self-reliance and the threat of American
conformity. Some scholars have read L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
first published in 1900, as an allegory about the social and political concerns of
Americans at the turn of the twentieth century.

Literary device
Personification: Personification allegory is a simple story in which the characters
transparently represent concepts or types.

Allegory examples

Allegories heavily rely on symbolism to embed an underlying meaning. But again,


allegory is not a symbol. It’s a story that stitches many symbols together to point at a
deeper or more complex message.
For example, think about a flag. A flag is a symbol of a country. Flying a flag in one’s
yard is a way to demonstrate pride in that country through the use of a symbol.
A more complex message might discuss the way that national pride is a positive quality
insofar as it unifies people around certain ideals but also how a threshold exists beyond
which national pride can become dangerous and exclusionary. This message is much
more nuanced and requires more elements than a front yard and a flagpole. This
message could form the foundation of an allegory.
Allegory is found in many different art forms, but we’ll focus on examples of famous
allegories in literature and philosophy.
One of the most famous examples of allegory is Animal Farm, by George Orwell. On its
surface, Animal Farm is a story about farm animals that rebel against their farmer. The
underlying story, however, concerns Orwell’s disillusionment with the Bolshevik
Revolution and is an indictment of the Russian government.
Aesop’s Fables is a collection of short stories that use animal characters to teach
children lessons about how to behave in society. Some of Aesop’s most famous fables
are The Fox and the Hedgehog, The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs, and of
course, The Tortoise and the Hare. Each story is an individual allegory.
Philosophy often explores complex, abstract ideas, so it is rife with examples of
allegory. Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave is an example of classical allegory. Plato’s
allegory tells a story about a group of people who spend their lives in a cave, generating
their understanding of the outside world based on the shadows they see on the cave’s
walls. The underlying message is about the limits of human understanding.
Sometimes modern works of fiction are read as allegory whether or not that was
intended by the author. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, published in 1954–
1955, has been read by scholars as both a biblical allegory exploring themes of good
and evil and as a modern allegory commenting on World War I. Tolkien denies both
interpretations, however. The reading of a text as allegory, regardless of its intention, is
called “allegoresis.”
S. Lewis’s series The Chronicles of Narnia, from 1950 to 1956, has also often been
cited as a work of biblical allegory, with Aslan representing a Christ character. That said,
Lewis has rejected this classification on technical grounds. While he does acknowledge
the biblical symbolism in the story, he does not think that it maps neatly enough onto the
Bible to consider it a full-blown allegory.

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