ALLEGORY

Allegory: A narrative that serves as an extended metaphor. Allegories

are written in the form of fables, parables, poems, stories, and almost
any other style or genre. The main purpose of an allegory is to tell a
story that has characters, a setting, as well as other types of symbols,
that have both literal and figurative meanings. The difference between
an allegory and a symbol is that an allegory is a complete narrative that
conveys abstract ideas to get a point across, while a symbol is a
representation of an idea or concept that can have a different meaning
throughout a literary work.

Definition of Allegory
Allegory is a figure of speech in which abstract ideas and principles are
described in terms of characters, figures and events. It can be employed
in prose and poetry to tell a story with a purpose of teaching an idea
and a principle or explaining an idea or a principle. The objective of its
use is to preach some kind of a moral lesson.

Difference between Allegory and Symbolism

Although an allegory uses symbols, it is different from symbolism. An
allegory is a complete narrative which involves characters, and events
that stand for an abstract idea or an event. A symbol, on the other hand,
is an object that stands for another object giving it a particular
meaning. Unlike allegory, symbolism does not tell a story. For
example, Plato in his Allegory of Cave tells a story of how some
people are ignorant and at the same time, some people see the light
stands for an idea and does not tell a story.

Examples of Allegory in Literature

Below are some famous examples of Allegory in Literature:
1. Animal Farm, written by George Orwell, is an allegory that uses
animals on a farm to describe the overthrow of the last of the Russian
Tsar Nicholas II and the Communist Revolution of Russia before WW
II. The actions of the animals on the farm are used to expose the greed
and corruption of the revolution. It also describes how powerful people
can change the ideology of a society. One of the cardinal rules on the
farm for the animals is:
All animals are equal but a few are more equal than others.
The animals on the farm represent different sections of Russian society
after the revolution. For instance, the pigs represent those who came to
power following the revolution; Mr. Jones the owner of the farm
represents the overthrown Tsar Nicholas II; while Boxer the horse,
represents the laborer class etc. The use of allegory in the novel allows
Orwell to make his position clear about the Russian Revolution and
expose its evils.

Function of Allegory
Writers use allegory to add different layers of meanings to their works.
Allegory makes their stories and characters multidimensional, so that
they stand for something larger in meaning than what they literally
stand for. Allegory allows writers to put forward their moral and
political point of views. A careful study of an allegorical piece of
writing can give us an insight into its writers mind as how he views
the world and how he wishes the world to be.

Definition:

The rhetorical strategy of extending a metaphor through an entire narrative so that objects,
persons, and actions in the text are equated with meanings that lie outside the text.
Adjective: allegorical.
One of the most famous allegories in English is John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678), a
tale of Christian salvation. Modern allegories include the films The Seventh Seal (1957)
and Avatar (2009) as well as the novels Animal Farm (1945) and The Lord of the Flies(1954).

Etymology:
From the Greek, "to speak so as to imply something other"

Examples and Observations:

"There are obvious layers of allegory [in the movie Avatar]. The Pandora woods is a
lot like the Amazon rainforest (the movie stops in its tracks for a heavy ecological speech
or two), and the attempt to get the Na'vi to 'cooperate' carries overtones of the U.S.
involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan."
(Owen Gleiberman, review of Avatar. Entertainment Weekly, Dec. 30, 2009)

"Probably the most famous example of allegory is the movie The Wizard of Oz, in
which cowardice is embodied in the lion, thoughtless panic in the scarecrow, and so on.
(Some have claimed that L. Frank Baum's Oz books are also political allegories: that the
scarecrow represents an agricultural past, for example, and the tin woodsman the
industrial future.)"
(David Mikics, A New Handbook of Literary Terms. Yale University Press, 2007)

Plato's Allegory of the Cave

"And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or
unenlightened: Behold! human beings living in an underground cave, which has a mouth
open towards the light and reaching all along the cave; here they have been from their
childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only
see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and
behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a
raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen
which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets. . . .

"And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and
disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to
stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp
pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his
former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that
what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being
and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision."
(Plato, "Allegory of the Cave" from Book Seven of The Republic)
 Allegory in George Orwell's Animal Farm
"One problem with allegories is in fact the difficulty of determining what counts
as source and what as target. For instance, Animal Farm is a text about a farm, which may
be taken as an explicit model for thinking about a more abstract, implicit target that has to
do with totalitarian politics. Or is Animal Farm a text about a farm which, as an explicit
target, is structured by our knowledge of a prior cultural text about totalitarian politics
which acts as an implicit source? The fact that totalitarian politics is abstract and the farm
is concrete favors the first analysis, but the fact that the global topic of the story of the text
is the life at this farm favors the latter. It is precisely one of the distinguishing
characteristics of allegory that the direction of the relation between the domains may be
read in two ways."
(Gerard Steen, Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage: A Methodological Analysis of
Theory and Research. John Benjamins, 2007)

The Allegory of Pilgrim's Progress

"The Celestial City, he said, he should die if he came not to it; and yet was dejected at
every difficulty, and stumbled at every straw that anybody cast in his way. Well, after he
had lain at the Slough of Despond a great while, as I have told you, one sunshine morning,
I do not know how, he ventured, and so got over; but when he was over, he would scarce
believe it. He had, I think, a Slough of Despond in his mind; a slough that he carried
everywhere with him, or else he could never have been as he was."
(John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress From This World to That Which Is to Come, 1678)

"Allegory is perhaps as old as language itself and certainly as variable as the

languages and styles in which it has been written. . . . Between occasional pinnacles,
allegory has maintained a constant presence in artistic forms and humanistic study. All on
its own, allegory inspires great works of literature and insightful commentary."
(Brenda Machosky, Thinking Allegory Otherwise. Stanford Univ. Press, 2010)