Allegory Examples in Short Stories: 6 Tales That Mean Two Things at Once
Quick answer: Allegory examples from Poe, Hawthorne, Kafka, Wilde, Andersen and Tolstoy, showing how a short story can run a second meaning under its surface from first line to last.
An allegory is a story whose characters, events and settings stand systematically for something else, so that the whole narrative can be read on two levels at once. It differs from a story with a symbol in it: in allegory the second meaning runs throughout, and the surface is built to carry it. The best allegories work as plain stories first. A reader who never notices the second level should still be moved by the first.
Six tales that mean two things at once
The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe has a prince wall a thousand courtiers into an abbey to escape a plague, hold a masked ball through seven coloured rooms, and die when the plague arrives in costume. The rooms run from blue in the east to black in the west: a life from dawn to death. Poe's surface is a horror story; his second level is that no wall keeps mortality out.
Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne sends a young Puritan into a forest at night to keep an appointment with a stranger whose staff resembles a serpent, past every respectable neighbour on the same errand. Brown's wife is named Faith and he leaves her behind at the door. Hawthorne is not subtle about the names, and the story is the stronger for playing its allegory openly.
A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka follows a professional faster whose audiences dwindle until he starves unnoticed in a circus cage, replaced after his death by a panther the crowds love. Read plainly it is a sad account of a fading act. Read as allegory it is about the artist, the public and the difference between discipline and appetite, and Kafka never says which reading he means.
The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde has a giant wall his garden against children, suffer perpetual winter, relent, and be carried to Paradise at last by the small boy he lifted into a tree. The boy's wounds are the wounds of Love. The tale works as a story for children about sharing and as a Christian allegory of grace, and Wilde keeps both alive to the last line.
The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen dresses a vain ruler in nothing on the assurance that the cloth is invisible to fools, and lets his whole court and city praise it until a child says what everyone sees. The surface is a joke; the allegory is about how power makes liars of the sane, and it has supplied a phrase to every language it has been translated into.
How Much Land Does a Man Need? by Leo Tolstoy begins with the Devil overhearing a peasant's boast that with enough land he would fear nobody, and ends with the peasant dead of exertion and buried in six feet of it. The Devil's presence in the opening tells the reader how to read what follows. Everything Pahom does is literal and everything is also a moral case.
How to use it in your own story
Allegory is planned at the level of the whole story. Decide what the second level is before drafting, then write the surface as if the second level did not exist.
Common mistakes
The commonest is allegory in which the surface story has no life of its own, so the reader is solving a puzzle rather than reading a story. A second is the moral spoken aloud at the end, which insults the reader who has already understood it. A third is inconsistency, where a character stands for one thing in the first half and something else in the second.
Where readers meet it today
Modern allegories readers will know include Ursula K. Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, George Orwell's Animal Farm, Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron and Jose Saramago's Blindness.
What writers can take from this
- Plan the second level, then write the first as if it were all there was.
- Specific physical detail keeps allegory from becoming diagram.
- Commit to the names or avoid them entirely.
- End on one event that closes both levels.
- Never explain the moral; if it needs explaining, the story has not carried it.
Try it yourself
Write a 700-word story about a small town that holds an annual competition with a rule nobody remembers the reason for. The story must work as a plain account of one year's contest, and must also be readable as an allegory of something you never name.
Questions
What is an example of allegory in a short story?
Poe's The Masque of the Red Death, where a prince's seven coloured rooms run from blue in the east to black in the west and the plague arrives at his ball in costume. The surface is horror; the second level is that mortality cannot be walled out.
How do you identify an allegory?
Look for a story in which the main characters, places and events can each be matched to a second meaning, consistently, from beginning to end. If only one object carries a second meaning, the story has a symbol, not an allegory.
Is a parable the same as an allegory?
A parable is a short allegory with a moral, usually told to teach, like Tolstoy's How Much Land Does a Man Need? Allegory is the broader term and can be long, ambiguous or without a stated lesson, as Kafka's A Hunger Artist is.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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