This Wikipedia article (citing this interview) says that Horton Hears A Who! is an allegory for the post-WW2 Allied occupation of Japan. I don't get it. Could somebody explain how an elephant who is ridiculed because he hears tiny people on a speck has anything to do with the Allied occupation?
posted by obiwanwasabi on Apr 22, 2009 - 5 answers

I'm looking for the title and/or author of a story I read years ago. It was about, or had in it, a description of a terrible kind of prison, a vast multilayered cylinder carved inside a mountain, that would rotate slowly around its course from the efforts of the prisoners inside. The only way to free those inside was, according to the story, to keep adding new prisoners to the vacated cells to keep pulling the thing along. [more inside]
posted by aeschenkarnos on Dec 11, 2007 - 14 answers

What's the difference between a metaphor, allegory, simile, and analogy? [more inside]
posted by Mach3avelli on Sep 27, 2007 - 14 answers

I am trying to find/identify a story about a customer with some problem (plumbing maybe?) and calls in an expert to fix it. The expert fixes the problem in some trivial way (turning a valve?) The customer then refuses to pay the expert's fee for such a simple fix. the punchline comes when the expert replies that his fee isn't for turning the valve, it's for knowing *which* valve to turn.
posted by mrgoldenbrown on Aug 9, 2007 - 10 answers