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Applicability Versus Allegory

When creating any work of fiction, there always seems to be a bit of tug and pull between what the story means to you, the writer, and what the story means to your readers.

Many prime examples of this exist within stories and movies alike, and to use an example that's simple enough, the movie "Inception" is about people who go into dreams. However, because these people spend so much time in dreams, they can sometimes struggle between telling reality from a dream. To fix this discrepancy, the main character has a trick. He spins a top. If it was a dream, he could make the top spin indefinitely. However, if it was reality, the top would fall over.

*Spoiler Alert* After the finale, the main character gets a seemingly happy ending. But then, suddenly cautious, he goes and spins a top. The story ends right there, never revealing if the top fell over or not. Was he in a dream? Was it real? Does that answer even matter?

I had a similar experience on this very site with my one-shot Vampire's Kiss. The vampire main lead has been stalking a woman the entire night, convinced he has fallen for her. At the end of the short story, he decides that he doesn't want her to grow old and die without him, so he bites her.

The way I wrote the story (and I found depending on your familiarity with the more modern Vampire lore), it's left up to the reader to decide whether the woman dies in the end, or whether she was turned into a vampire herself. I've had readers come up to me angry that I killed her and it didn't seem like the vampire would do that. Then others come up to me wondering why he'd leave her there on the street if he was going to change her.

And you can psychoanalyze his actions and the "true" outcome of the story all you want. Physics majors have measured the top in Inception and tried to calculate its angle of rotation to see if it would eventually tip over or not. However, when it comes to making demands upon the original author, that's the problem. The author intended the ending to be ambiguous. The author wanted you to think about two potential options. The author wanted you to take from the experience what you wanted to.

It doesn't matter what the creator thinks is the cannon ending, because when the creator made the creation, he never intended it to have a canon ending. The ambivalence was the ending.

So why am I talking about ambivalence? The reason is because today I'm talking about symbolism and interpretation of works. Or perhaps, more specifically, the seeming balance between applicability versus allegory.

Applicability in the context of fiction is the act of describing something as it exists. A story that is applicable is a story that stands on its own ground. Its characters, its actions, and its inevitable progress are all ground in the common sense of that world. Things happen for the reasons that happen, and those reasons work within that narrative.

Allegory is simply a fancy word for symbolism. In this case, this is what everything means. A story should make sense within it's narrative, but the story is really about alcohol abuse, and these characters represent alcoholics while these characters represent their family dealing with the effect of their alcohol addiction. Or, how about this one. The sheets are red because it represents lust. These drapes in this scene are purple to show you the regality of her love interest.

In the past, I've mentioned using symbolism (and allegory), to set up foreshadowing and create a more interesting story. However, there is certainly a lot of allegory that gets applied to fiction that the author never intended to have either. Sometimes, red sheet are just red because they needed a color. Like my examples of Inception and Vampire's kiss, just because the author never intended for those sheets to mean anything, doesn't mean they don't mean anything. The reader themselves can take what they want from any store. If the story speaks to them because these characters resonate with their father's alcohol addiction, it doesn't matter that the author never had those intentions. The readers themselves are free to gain what they want from a story, and sometimes improve upon it.