Allegory: A Story That Stands for Something Else

Recognize allegory, where characters and events consistently represent ideas, institutions, or historical events.

An allegory is a narrative in which characters, settings, and events systematically stand for something beyond themselves, often moral, political, or spiritual ideas. It differs from a single symbol because the correspondence runs through the whole story. In George Orwell's Animal Farm, for example, the animals' revolution and its betrayal parallel the Russian Revolution and the rise of a dictatorship. In older religious allegories, characters are even named for virtues or vices.

Consider an original miniature: a village elects a weather vane as mayor because it always points somewhere confident; the vane spins with every gust, and the village slowly forgets where it meant to go. On the literal level it is a fable; on the allegorical level it critiques leaders who follow opinion instead of principle. To read allegorically, ask what each element could consistently represent, and test whether the mapping holds across the plot rather than in only one scene.

• 1Allegory maps a whole story onto another meaning.
• 2It differs from a single, isolated symbol.
• 3Test whether the mapping holds across the plot.