# Subtle allegories. A complete oxymoron? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [March 9, 2013, 8:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subtle-allegories-a-complete-oxymoron/652502 "2013-03-09T20:53:38Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2013, 8:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subtle-allegories-a-complete-oxymoron/652502/1 "2013-03-09T20:53:38Z")
Wife was watching _District 9_ the other night. I didn’t join her because my head still hurts from being hit repeatedly with the “This is about apartheid!” stick the first time I saw it. I may be over-sensitive to allegory. In the 4th grade I was subjected to _The Pilgrim’s Progress_ and thought that the stone obviousness was intentionally funny, though later I realized it’s supposed to be intensely dull. Then in 7th grade my English teacher thought we should all read _Animal Farm._ Y’know, it’s not subtle when you can go through it and say, “Snowball is Trotsky except when he’s Lenin,” and I preferred the anti-Soviet propaganda in Religion class because it had comics. So, are there any subtle allegories out there, or is it impossible for a work to contain both natures without causing the universe to implode? For more fun, what are some over the top allegories that we can laugh at? Or, better yet, works with which the creator tried to be subtle, but failed miserably? ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2013, 9:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subtle-allegories-a-complete-oxymoron/652502/2 "2013-03-10T21:41:38Z")
_sigh_ I thought you people might enjoy this. I guess not. Alas! _slinking away in shame. AFTER, of course, bumping the thread_ ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2013, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subtle-allegories-a-complete-oxymoron/652502/3 "2013-03-10T22:33:39Z")
**The Wizard of Oz** 😉 John Barth’s **Giles Goat Boy** is fairly subtle, though you eventually catch on. ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2013, 1:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subtle-allegories-a-complete-oxymoron/652502/4 "2013-03-11T01:24:45Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > **The Wizard of Oz** 😉 Well, if you are 18 and studying US economic history of the late 19th century it becomes blindingly obvious… 😉 Were the slippers EVER silver? My professor said they were and represented Free Silver, but I was never interested enough to read the book. ---
**Author:** ![NDP](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ndp/32/55_2.png) [@NDP](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NDP)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2013, 1:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subtle-allegories-a-complete-oxymoron/652502/5 "2013-03-11T01:50:16Z")
> [@dropzone](#): > > Then in 7th grade my English teacher thought we should all read _Animal Farm._ Y’know, it’s not subtle when you can go through it and say, “Snowball is Trotsky except when he’s Lenin,” and I preferred the anti-Soviet propaganda in Religion class because it had comics. > > So, are there any subtle allegories out there, or is it impossible for a work to contain both natures without causing the universe to implode? Actually, you’d be surprised on how many people seemingly miss seemingly obvious allegories. For example, during my sophomore year in high school, I heard a student complain about having to read some stupid childish book about talking farm animals and nasty pigs. It was, of course, the aforementioned **Animal Farm**. Apparently, the fact it was an allegory about the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalin missed her completely. (And what was really irritating was she ended up with better grades than I got that semester.) ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2013, 2:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subtle-allegories-a-complete-oxymoron/652502/6 "2013-03-11T02:12:14Z")
Given that the Russian Revolution was nearly a hundred years ago allowances should be made and explanations should be provided. The teacher probably said something but your friend missed it. Or didn’t care. The Cold War was still raging when I read it. ---
**Author:** ![NDP](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ndp/32/55_2.png) [@NDP](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NDP)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2013, 3:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subtle-allegories-a-complete-oxymoron/652502/7 "2013-03-11T03:47:21Z")
> [@dropzone](#): > > Given that the Russian Revolution was nearly a hundred years ago allowances should be made and explanations should be provided. The teacher probably said something but your friend missed it. Or didn’t care. The Cold War was still raging when I read it. Likewise, since this happened in 1981. Incidentally, I did not have the same literature class that was reading “Animal Farm” so I wouldn’t know what–if anything–the teacher said about the book being an allegory for the Russian Revolution. I had read the book several years earlier on my own and knew enough about the history of the Soviet Union to get the obvious character parallels. ---
**Author:** ![Lamia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2013, 4:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subtle-allegories-a-complete-oxymoron/652502/8 "2013-03-11T04:07:29Z")
> [@dropzone](#): > > Were the slippers EVER silver? My professor said they were and represented Free Silver, but I was never interested enough to read the book. The magical slippers are indeed silver in the book _The Wonderful Wizard of Oz_, although there’s little reason to believe there was any sort of political symbolism intended. Here’s The Master on the subject: [Is The Wizard of Oz a satire of the French Revolution? - The Straight Dope](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/362/is-em-the-wizard-of-oz-em-a-satire-of-the-french-revolution) And here’s Wikipedia: [The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonderful_Wizard_of_Oz#The_Gold_Standard_representation_of_the_story) ---
**Author:** ![astorian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ad7895/32.png) [@astorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astorian)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2013, 2:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subtle-allegories-a-complete-oxymoron/652502/9 "2013-03-11T14:55:42Z")
“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.”- J. R. R. Tolkien Samuel Beckett always denied that there was any allegory involved (he said it was merely a story “about people who are like that”), but I think\*\*\* Waiting For Godot \*\*\*had an effective and subtle allegory. Vladimir and Estragon represent human beings who are waiting for God to manifest Himself. They wait a long time, and he never seems to appear… but a child (representing the Church and the prophets) keeps arriving and telling them to keep waiting, for Godot will surely come tomorrow. They’re let wondering (as the faithful in the real world must occasionally wonder) if 1. Godot will arrive if they just wait faithfully a little longer 2. They’re wasting their time waiting for someone who will never arrive (and who sounds like an abusive bastard… is he worth waiting for even if he’s real?) 3. Maybe Godot has already come and gone and they just failed to recognize him (remember, Vladimir starts to wonder if perhaps Pozzo WAS Godot!)… just as Christians believe Jesus (who was God) came to Earth and was ignored or rejected by countless people who were faithfully awaiting the coming of the Messiah, because he wasn’t what they were expecting. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2013, 3:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subtle-allegories-a-complete-oxymoron/652502/10 "2013-03-11T15:32:31Z")
I’m going to defend **NDP** ’s student here, because _Animal Farm_ is pretty worthless _as literature_ these days. It’s more of a piece of historical fiction, and should be read in history class immersed in its proper historical context. Here’s the point of _Animal Farm_: **STALIN IS BAD! No, really! He isn’t a pleasant little Socialist you’d invite over for tea! If he were here, the entirety of the Left Book Club, not to mention most other things, would be shot, sent to gulags, or shot and then sent to gulags!** That’s what Orwell was trying to get across. That’s what he’d been yelling for a while before he wrote the book, too. He was writing in a time and place (Britain in the Second World War) when that actually needed to be said. He couldn’t find a publisher for _Animal Farm_ until after the war. Orwell was an odd figure in the Britain of his time in that he was an avowed Socialist who was _also_ unabashedly anti-Stalin, and had been since before the war. Orwell realized that, even if your enemy is Hitler, your allies aren’t necessarily nice people, or even nice in comparison. It’s possible for evil to find a reason to fight someone who’s just as evil. All of the foregoing really needs to be part of any study of _Animal Farm_. Otherwise, yeah, it’s pretty pointless; it was written to fulfill a specific role that no longer needs to be filled, and it was written in a specific context that’s fairly alien to most people alive today. Strip it of its context, and it lives down to all of the worst stereotypes of English class: The over-analysis of a simplistic story you’d never dream of reading for pleasure.