An allegory is a story, often an extended metaphor, in which characters, places and events carry a second, figurative meaning, usually moral, religious or political.
Where the term comes from
The Poetry Foundation describes an allegory as an extended metaphor in which the characters, places and objects of a narrative carry figurative meaning, often religious, moral or historical. It names John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene as two major allegorical works in English. Merriam-Webster defines the word as the expression of truths or generalizations about human existence by means of symbolic figures and actions, and dates its first known use to the 14th century.
Wikipedia gives George Orwell's Animal Farm as a modern case, in which the pigs stand for political figures of the Russian Revolution. The common thread is that the surface story is complete in itself, but the reader is invited to read it a second time as something else.
An example
In the novella The Tin Crown, Queen Verity Moss rules a clockwork kingdom whose gears are slowly seizing. She has three counsellors named Haste, Habit and Doubt, and each advises her in character. Haste wants to replace the main spring tonight. Habit insists that the kingdom has always run on the old one. Doubt keeps asking whether the spring is the problem at all. The plot is a plain story about a ruler choosing among advisers, but readers soon see a mind arguing with itself, and that the queen's failure to listen to any one of them for long is her real fault. When she finally adjusts the spring by half a turn, the kingdom does not heal completely, which fits the moral the story has been building.
Common mistakes
- Making the story only a vehicle for the message, with flat characters who exist to be decoded.
- Mapping every detail one to one, which turns the plot into a puzzle with a single answer.
- Explaining the meaning in the narration, so the reader has nothing left to notice.
- Confusing allegory with symbolism. A symbol is a single image; an allegory sustains the figurative meaning across the whole story.
- Letting the surface story fail. If the literal tale is dull, no one reads far enough to find the second one.
How to check your manuscript
Write one sentence for the literal story and one for the figurative one. If either could stand alone as a worse version, the allegory needs work. Then pick a scene and ask whether it still pleases a reader who sees only the surface. For nearby ideas, see theme, archetype and trope.
In Musael, world and characters lets you link entries by relationship, so the figures who stand for ideas stay connected to the ones who oppose them.