Allegorical elements

An allegory is an abstract representation of principals or ideas through the use of characters, figures or events. It is also the classification for a creative work, such as a story or a play, which makes use of allegory. In most cases, allegory is the term used (rather than metaphor) when the symbolic representations reflect an aspect of human behavior or values.

The term allegory originated from the Greek term allegoria (speaking otherwise). It came into common use through plays, generally religious, which would act out human frailties in order to teach a lesson. Characters (often taking the form of animals) would actually be named for their representation. The betrayer would be named “betrayal”, the evil character named “evil” the faithful character named “faith”. The characters had few, if any, characteristics beyond their representation of a concept. These plays were publicly called allegories and were performed at religious gatherings.

Allegories took many forms over the years, such as fables and parables. The story of the tortoise and the hare is an allegory, expressing the belief that the slow and steady will always defeat the quick and prideful in the end.

While the old-time allegories were very direct in showing the audience what represented what, over time allegories became more subtle. In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, for example, the white whale is seen as an allegory for evil. In the Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, the fight clubs are an allegory for modern man’s repressed primal instincts and the need to express them.

Most novels and plays contain some allegorical elements. Symbolic representations of emotions or dilemmas are such a common concept that often writers include them without even realizing they are doing so. Of course, the most masterful of writers are very conscious of the allegories they are creating, even when the allegories seem subtle to the audience.

by John Hewitt

For more information read:

The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition by C. S. Lewis

Allegories of Reading by Paul De Man

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

Three linguistic representations

Allegory is a way of shaping a story so that the characters and the setting are developed so as to have both a literal meaning on the primary level and a secondary meaning on the next level.

Symbolism is the use of the literary symbol, or the use of an object so that the attributes of the object become a substitute for some idea or entity with special significance.

Typology is subtly different from symbolism and is in fact often used as a synonym for symbolism, but it refers more specifically to the representation of things by objects in the sense of representing an entire class or type in one symbolic representation or character.

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Allegory to reject

Allegory has represented the orthodox vision of America as the chosen redeemer nation, the world’s last and best chance, and allegory has given a voice to those who dissent from this vision, who use allegory only to reject what it was come to stand for. MADSEN, Deborah L

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Symbol as a negative moment

According to Paul de Man, the Coleridgean symbol represents the "negative" moment of the romantic dialectic; the positive moment is allegory, a system of signs in which the relation of a sign to signified is superseded by tile relation of signifier to signifier in a temporal sequence.

"Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference".

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Unreflected attitude to language

Paul de Man begins with an opposition between allegory and irony.

Allegory is a naïve or unreflected attitude to language. We think that there is a real world and that our language is then a sign of that world. Irony, by contrast, shows that the supposed ‘nature’ that precedes the sign. The self that we supposedly lost is produced through the poem; the poem creates or institutes the division between self and sign. However, any idea that the ironic poem could overcome allegory – or a division between sign and self – is itself naïve.

Any explanation of irony is itself a narrative, is itself always caught up in allegory.

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Renouncing the nostalgia

Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference.

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Symbol and allegory

• According to Paul de Man, symbol is a feature of an art which attempts to transcend , avoid, or deny the inescapable fact of temporality in embodied human existence


• Allegory not only does not attempt to avoid temporality, it highlights human finitude.

In symbol, subject and object are a unity: "the symbol is founded on an intimate unity between the image that rises up before the senses and the suprasensory totality that the image suggests."

In allegory, subject and object are irreconcilably different and separate: "in the world of allegory, time is the originary constitutive category . . . . The meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can . . . consist only in the repetition . . . of a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is of the essence of this previous sign to be pure anteriority."

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