One More Thing

I feel like Colombo here. Except that he carefully calculates his moves so that as he turns to leave, he has some amazing whopper of a question designed to lay bare someone's true guilt. With me, it's more of "so I thought of this after I had already published my last post."

Here it is:
The Shack is not allegorical. Allegory is defined thus: 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.

Does The Shack have two meanings? Let's not give yet more undue credit to its author for thinking about his content on multiple levels. He writes in a straightforward manner, portraying God in human form. Papa (God the Father, according to Young) makes comments about himself/herself/itself (?); words from the mouth of God carry a certain amount of weight, no? How many allegories have you read that involve dialogue issuing straight from God? That's not symbolic, folks, that's just fiction.

The only thing I can see in The Shack as being somewhat allegorical was the personification of wisdom. No comment on the quality or accuracy of her discourse. What do you think? If you've read The Shack, how would you defend the claim of many Christians that it is an allegory? Or, like me, do you place The Shack at the opposite end of the allegorical spectrum from classic works like The Pilgrim's Progress?

[*ht: http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/lit_terms/allegory.html for allegory definition. It was consistent with the other definitions I found in my search, and seemed more thorough than others. My apologies for not citing it at first.]