—Dorothea Knoblock.
III. Allegory
The word allegory is used widely to signify any figurative and symbolic writing (proverb, parable, metaphor, simile, or allegory proper); but we are going to use it in its distinctive and academic sense as a rhetorical and narrative type.
Characteristics
Like the fable and the parable, the allegory teaches a lesson; like them it is a story, but longer than either, more detailed than either. Connected with the actors in it are generally abstract ideas used figuratively, directly personified as people on adventures or used to form the atmosphere, the goal of attainment, the place of destination, the road over which the hero travels. For instance, Youth sets out from the House of Innocence over the Road of Life and strays into the Path of Temptation that leads through the Wood of Error. Here he meets Falsehood and Shame, and overcomes them, for the time at least, and passes through the clearing of Experience toward the Castle of Perseverance, grim and dark and uninviting, that stands hard by, yet beyond, the House of Mirth, etc., etc.
When you write an allegory, you will not be so trite as this illustrative example, but will get a good idea, a good spiritual lesson, and will teach it with a unique and original plot in which the adventures themselves are interesting. The world's greatest prose allegory, "Pilgrim's Progress," has always been read for the story. The "Faerie Queene" as a metrical romance and a triple allegory of religion, Elizabeth's court, and the perfect man, has been a storehouse for prose narrators as well as for poets for three hundred years. Practically all the old morality plays were allegories. "Everyman," the best extant, is very vital indeed when put on the stage.
Plato's "Vision of Er"
Plato's great myth-allegory in the "Republic" was designed by him to teach his people his theory of the transmigration of souls and how they might safely pass over the river of Forgetfulness without being defiled and might hold fast to the heavenly way and follow after Justice and Virtue always, considering that the soul is immortal and able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. Popularly the story is known as a vision; but Socrates, Plato's literary character who tells the story, calls it a tale, a tale of a brave man Er, the Son of Armenius, who, on the twelfth day, as he was lying on the funeral pile, returned to life and told what he had seen in the other world.
This device of a vision was widely adopted, doubtless indirectly from Plato, as a good framework for allegory. We find the medieval poets dreaming dreams and letting their souls depart from their bodies pretty generally.
Modern Allegories