Question

Could someone help me with my modern allegory? I have my story, I just need help making it into an allegory

Answer 1

Now how can I make this into a modern allegory? What can be my symbol?

Answer 2

An allegory is generally not a story that depicts another story. It is usually a story that explains something of real life. Like how Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is not about zen or motorcycle maintenance, but rather uses the story to question our values.

http://grammar.about.com/od/terms/g/allegory.htm

Answer 3

Then you need to find metaphors for the key elements. And you made an allegory of an allegory? Hmm... Canterbury Tales is allegorical already.

Answer 4

Sorry I meant that I need to figure out how I can make this story idea I have made into two. Meaning how can I have someone telling the story of this, but have a reason why he is telling it.

Answer 5

I am stuck on how to make this an allegory, like what in this story can I make a symbol of how being clever can accomplish anything.

Answer 6

So you want this story to be an allegory of something else?

Right now, that cleverness part seems like a moral of it... though it is not a morality tale in the sense of what we think of as morals.

Answer 7

Alright, well in the Canterbury Tales, have you read it before?

Answer 8

I read a small part of them some time ago. Not really familiar with them. I know Plato's Allegory of the Cave very well.

Answer 9

Oh, well in the first story called the Pardoner's Tale, it is about a man who tell a story about three rioters who are looking for someone named "Death". In the long run, they find coins by the tree of where Death is suppose to be, Greed takes over and two of the men want to kill the other and the other wants to kill the two men and in the end Death takes over since they all died. Now Death symbolizes their own deaths.

Answer 10

The man told this story because he believed that if he told them that he could take away their sins in return for what they had then he could get what he wanted, more like a greedy man wanting whatever he could have. So I believe the moral of the story is about greed but Death I believe was what made it an allegory if I am correct.

Answer 11

Chaucer was a religious reformer before religious reform was popular. I remember a little on him from a bit of history of English. He was making tales that were not Biblical, and therefore not heretical, but that tried to show the consequences of poor morals from the religious standpoint.

Answer 12

Okay well, to make my story an allegory, do I have to make a symbol inside the story or what do I do?

Answer 13

Well, the things that are happening need to relate to something else. It is a set of metaphors that thread through the entire thing.

Answer 14

Let me give you the overview of the cave just because I know it.

Plato starts by saying the cave is an example of man's relationship to true wisdom. Then he says that there are these people in a ave that know nothing about the light. He goes on to describe their pitiful lives as being chained up and seeing shadows and believing this to be the truth. Then one of them is dragged into the light and finds the real truth. When he goes back, he is ridiculed by the other for telling lies, but he never gives up on the truth.

Plato's teacher, Socrates, was a proponent of the forms: that there is a true version of things that all other things are a poor copy of. In his quest to learn the forms, he irritated and insulted many people. But he clung to his views no matter what and was put to death for it.

See how the allegory of the cave (well that synopsis of it) relates to what happened with Socrates?