Allegory

Finding hidden messages that the author has inserted in their text is a really tricky thing and usually a flash point for arguments, especially if the message doesn't sit well with people who really admire said author. An example of this is when I pointed out to several people that I thought Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game was nothing but a well-hidden diatribe against gay people (and therefore unworthy of the awards it has received--yup I said it). As I read it, I kept shaking my head at the homophobic references which pepper the text. Then one day I looked up the word "bugger" and discovered it was British slang for "sodomite", a.k.a. "homosexual" and suddenly everything clicked. Taken aback by my findings, I thought to absolve Mr. Card of said bigotry by using Google but nope... he's a confirmed bigot. So yeah, I was right (and got blasted on forums for voicing my opinion).

I'm a critical reader and I look for hidden messages. I can't turn it off...I'm sorry...it's just who I am. If my friend Roguemutt wrote three novels and all of them featured 12-year-old girls getting married to 40-year-old men and these men were very excited to take these girls to bed with them over and over across thousands of pages...I would call mutt a pedophile. This is an extreme example but it shows you how I read books as I look for author intent.

The definition of allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.

Thus an allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.

Everyone who has been reading my blog knows I've been working my way through Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. Right now, I'm on the third book, a 2000-page work on my iPad (I increased the font size to make it easier to read) called A Storm of Swords. I'm not going to cover how I think it's a soap opera seeing as I did that in an earlier post. No...what I'm going to cover here is the underlying message that Mr. Martin has been pounding into my head and suddenly "I got it" in a chapter where Daenerys gathered an army of "unsullied" by purchasing them as slaves and then commanded them to destroy an entire city.

The message is simple: WOMEN ARE THE DEATH OF MEN.

It's pounded over and over in these books. Mr. Martin, I believe, is a modern day misogynist.

As you may already know, medieval misogyny gave rise to chivalry. The belief that Eve was responsible for consorting with snakes and thereby God threw all of humanity out of the Garden of Eden. Chivalry arose from misogyny as men sought a means to disarm women of their sorceries, witchcrafts, and curses that they were prone to cast over men to do them ill.

In Martin's books, every single horrible thing that has befallen a man has come from consorting with a woman. Khal Drogo died because a witch that said she could cure him of a minor wound poisoned him. Ser Jorah Mormont lost all his land for love of a woman. Cersei killed the king and tried to have Tirrion killed. The men of Astapor underestimated a woman and paid for it with their lives! In other words, all the men who exist in their version of an "Eden" are undone by women and a terrible fate befalls them.

I'm almost a third of the way through with A Storm of Swords but I will make a predictions on the novels based off of this theme.

Every man in these books that dies that is considered a prominent character will have a death directly related back to a woman (this includes as yet unreleased material).

What do you guys think? You fans of the books that are out there...can you furnish an example of a prominent male character that dies that was not offed as a direct correlation to a woman?