Great Allegories in Literature

An allegory is a literary form which expresses complex abstract ideas in a reader-friendly comprehensible format.

Probably the greatest allegory in English literature is John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress" which shows the protagonist Christian's spiritual journey towards the Celestial City as an actual journey with many hazards on the way, each of them anthropomorphised like "Giant" Despair. It is sad to see a great piece of literature being marginalised now to theological studies, depriving many of savouring Bunyan's great imagination. George Bernard Shaw thought so highly of this work, that he proved Bunyan greater than even Shakespeare by many quoted examples.

A similar spiritual journey, shown as a real physical one with even geographical landmarks, was Dante's "The Divine Comedy", showing the soul's ascent to Paradise through Hell & Purgatory.

Hermann Melville's "Moby Dick", with its copious digressions on the technicalities of whaling, is also not just an obsessive, maimed Captain Ahab's vindictive chase of an albino whale, but something much more deeper in the human condition.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", which many consider the most perfectly constructed novel, is also an allegory of sin & redemption, with Pearl, child of an adulterous union, being dressed in finery by her mother.

George Orwell's "Animal Farm" was a thinly disguised depiction of the early days of Communist Russia.

Even the children's novel, Frances Hodgson Burnett's "The Secret Garden" is an allegorical depiction of an abandoned garden becoming a redemptive symbol for three children.

To sum up, allegorical novels add additional levels of meaning to seemingly simple narratives, transforming them to richly layered works of Art.