If the first gift may be read allegorically, the other one is itself an allegory. It is a book, given to Self by Martina Twain, the female agent of the author in the novel, the woman representing the only hope of genuine human emotions, the very tentative initiator of rewriting Self's life as a redemption story instead of the definitive version we are reading. The book is Animal Farm, a well-known allegory. Self, who does not read books anyway, has a very tough time poring over Orwell's book—reading Animal Farm is a kind of test, something he has to accomplish in order to meet Martina again; (setting a test is one of the ways in which Martina tries to transform Self's life into a story with meaning.) Even after he has got through the book, Self does not understand it: he does not get the allegorical meaning, unable to recreate a higher level above the literal meaning of the words. To put it in another way: Orwell's allegory is not a consumer's good and Self is simply not equipped with the kind of reading/consuming strategy the text would require. He is incapable of switching over into a different (say, esthetic) mode of appropriation, called for by a text that insists on its otherness from the reader—in the sense that it sets up obstacles in the way of the interpretation, i.e., it demands work, interpretative investment to bring out what it yields: surplus meaning, deeper (or higher) meaning, an immediately inaccessible level of meaning.

It is certainly not by chance that Self's first venture into what he calls "the bookish, contemplative life" is by way of an allegory (although Orwell is relevant in other respects as well; 1984 also features on the reading list compiled by Martina as a 20th century "survival kit," reinforcing the dystopian atmosphere of the novel). The word "allegory" actually appears in the novel when Self is discussing his formative reading experience with Martina (Amis 212).

Self's first reading experience seems to be a kind of mise en abyme, providing a clue for our interpretation. Let it be noted, however, that it is not Animal Farm itself that functions as a mise en abyme, but the reading process (itself). Self is reading a book the allegorical meaning of which eludes him entirely; fortunately, there is someone to provide the explanation (she happens to be the agent of the author). If this episode is really a miniature duplicate of the novel, and if the novel is really an allegory, it is an "allegory of reading the world." Self fails entirely as the reader of his life, and since this reading assumes an existential significance, the failure to read properly incurs real punishment. Seen in this light. Money is the allegory of misreading a world that although full of signs, cannot be read allegorically, since the authority to explain (that of the implied, or in this case "implicated" rather than implied author) is questioned, or taken over by eternal systems of signification. Besides the allusion to Orwell, Amis's novel abounds in other signals of allegory, invitations to allegorical reading. The novel offers itself as an allegory in several ways, disrupting at the same time the possibilities of allegorizing. I shall now look at four aspects of this self-subverting allegorical invitation, comparing it occasionally with Zola's much more straightforward allegory.

First of all, Amis's text offers itself as an extended trope, the general allegory of money. This (the allegorical mode of the text) is confirmed by two conspicuously planted instances of personification allegory very early on in the novel. "Inflation, they say, is cleaning up this city. Dough is rolling up its sleeves and mucking the place out" (Amis 3). The second one, on the very next page, is even more conspicuous:

 Fear walks tall on this planet. Fear walks big and fine... One of these days I'm going to walk right up to fear ... I'm going to walk right up and say, 'Okay, hard-on, No more of this. You've pushed us around for long enough. Here is someone who would not take it. It's over. Outside? ... Fear is a bully, but something tells me that fear is no funker. Fear, I suspect, is really incredibly brave. Fear will lead me straight through the door, will prop me up in the alley among the crates and empties, and show me who's the boss ... Now I come to think about it, maybe I'd better let fear be. He's too good at fighting, ... fear really scares me. He's too good at fighting, and I'm too frightened anyway. (Amis 212)

 In this extremely effective hypertrophied allegory, the little narrative creates a reality of its own, so that even the tautological phrase "fear really scares me" seems to make sense in the context, while it also reattaches the allegory to the primary reality of the novel. Money reappears later as the object of personification allegory, as in the sentence "We are all stomped and roughed up and peed on and slammed against the wall by money" (270).