"Call me Ishmael." The first line of Moby-Dick is three words long. In Genesis, Ishmael is Abraham's son by Hagar, sent out into the desert, so the narrator has named himself an outcast without saying so. That's allusion, which the Cambridge Dictionary defines as something said or written that is intended to make you think of a particular thing or person.
Everyday Allusions and Where They Come From
Thirty-five phrases, grouped by where they come from.
From the Bible
| Phrase | Means | Source |
|---|---|---|
| a good Samaritan | a stranger who helps | Luke 10:33, the parable of the man beaten by robbers |
| David and Goliath | a small side beating a giant | 1 Samuel 17 |
| forbidden fruit | something tempting because it's banned | Genesis 2:17, "thou shalt not eat of it" |
| a prodigal son | a wastrel who comes home | Luke 15, the son who "wasted his substance with riotous living" |
| the writing on the wall | a sign of coming doom | Daniel 5, the hand writing at Belshazzar's feast |
| salt of the earth | a good, decent person | Matthew 5:13 |
| go the extra mile | do more than asked | Matthew 5:41, "go with him twain" |
| a doubting Thomas | a skeptic who wants proof | John 20:25 |
| the patience of Job | endless patience | James 5:11 |
All nine come from the King James Bible, though not always in these words: "forbidden fruit" never appears there, and the fruit is never called an apple.
From Greek and Roman Myth
| Phrase | Means | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Achilles' heel | a single fatal weakness | the hero's one vulnerable spot; the story isn't in Homer, but in later retellings |
| Pandora's box | a source of endless trouble | Hesiod's Works and Days, where it's a jar: "the woman took off the great lid of the jar" |
| the Midas touch | everything you touch turns to money | Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 11 |
| a narcissist | someone in love with themselves | Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 3: Narcissus falls for his own reflection |
| a Herculean task | a job that needs enormous strength | the twelve labors of Hercules |
| a Trojan horse | an enemy hidden inside a gift | Virgil's Aeneid, Book 2: "Trust not their presents, nor admit the horse." |
| an odyssey | a long, eventful journey | Homer's Odyssey |
| a mentor | a trusted guide | the Odyssey: Athena, disguised as Odysseus's old friend Mentor, guides his son |
| a Sisyphean task | endless, pointless work | the Odyssey, Book 11: "Sisyphus at his endless task raising his prodigious stone" |
| between Scylla and Charybdis | stuck between two dangers | the Odyssey, Book 12 |
From Shakespeare and Other Books
| Phrase | Means | Source |
|---|---|---|
| a Romeo | a romantic lover | Romeo and Juliet |
| the green-eyed monster | jealousy | Othello, Act 3, Scene 3 |
| "Et tu, Brute?" | betrayal by a friend | Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 1 |
| a Scrooge | a miser | Dickens, A Christmas Carol |
| a Pollyanna | a relentless optimist | Eleanor H. Porter, Pollyanna and her "just being glad" game |
| Jekyll and Hyde | a person with two opposite sides | Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: "man is not truly one, but truly two" |
| Lilliputian | tiny, or petty | Swift, Gulliver's Travels, Part 1 |
| tilting at windmills | fighting imaginary enemies | Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part 1, Chapter 8 |
| a Cinderella story | an unknown who suddenly succeeds | Perrault's fairy tale |
| down the rabbit hole | into a strange, absorbing tangle | Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 1 |
| a Catch-22 | a rule you can't win against | Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 |
| Big Brother | an authority that watches everyone | George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four |
From History
| Phrase | Means | Source |
|---|---|---|
| crossing the Rubicon | passing the point of no return | Caesar taking his army into Italy, told in Suetonius' Lives of the Twelve Caesars: "The die is now cast." |
| a Pyrrhic victory | a win that costs too much | King Pyrrhus in Plutarch's Lives: "one other such would utterly undo him" |
| meeting your Waterloo | a final, decisive defeat | Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815 |
| fiddling while Rome burns | ignoring a crisis | Suetonius says Nero "sung a poem on the ruin of Troy" during the fire; there's no fiddle in the source |
Allusions to the Bible in Literature
"Call me Ishmael."
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 1. Hagar's son in Genesis 16, sent away into the desert in Genesis 21.
"Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!"
Moby-Dick, Chapter 16. Captain Peleg says it in praise of Ahab, and Ishmael answers with the rest of the story: the biblical Ahab was the wicked king whose blood the dogs licked, in 1 Kings 21–22.
"and he must be about His Father’s business"
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Chapter 6, on Gatsby. Luke 2:49, the boy Jesus in the temple.
"she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers"
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 1. Baby Moses in "an ark of bulrushes", Exodus 2:3. Huck's "Bulrushers" shows how much of the lesson stuck.
"Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree"
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1. The tree of knowledge in Genesis 2.
"I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel"
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Chapter 10. The creature to Victor: God's first man, and Satan as Milton tells it. The creature later reads Paradise Lost itself.
"Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in tears amid the alien corn"
John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale", in Poems Published in 1820. The Book of Ruth, the widow gleaning in a foreign field.
"To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”"
T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", in Prufrock and Other Observations. John 11, the man raised from the dead.
"Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter"
"Prufrock" again. The head of John the Baptist, Matthew 14, made comic by "grown slightly bald".
"In a very few hours I arrived in a city that always makes me think of a whited sepulchre."
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Part 1. Matthew 23:27: tombs painted white outside and full of bones within.
"A house divided against itself cannot stand."
Abraham Lincoln, the House Divided speech of 1858, in Papers and Writings. Mark 3:25. Lincoln put the line in quotation marks himself.
"So Eden sank to grief"
Robert Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay", in New Hampshire. The Fall of Adam and Eve, in five words.
"Introibo ad altare Dei."
James Joyce, Ulysses, the first page. The opening words of the Latin Mass, "I will go unto the altar of God", said by Buck Mulligan over his shaving bowl.
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Allusions to Greek and Roman Myth
"So excellent a king; that was to this / Hyperion to a satyr"
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 2. His dead father is the sun god; his uncle, the new king, is a goat-legged satyr.
"but no more like my father / Than I to Hercules"
Hamlet, the same speech. Hercules stands for everything Hamlet thinks he isn't.
"Like Niobe, all tears"
Hamlet, the same speech, on his mother at the funeral. Niobe lost all her children and was turned into a weeping rock.
"Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds, / Towards Phoebus’ lodging. Such a waggoner / As Phaeton would whip you to the west"
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 2. Phaeton drove the sun's chariot so wildly that he set the earth on fire. Juliet wants night to come that fast.
"Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?"
Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2. The Roman sea god stands for all the water in the world.
"this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus"
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 1. Two beautiful youths from Ovid. The second, who falls in love with his own image, points to where the novel goes.
"Frankenstein; / or, the Modern Prometheus"
Mary Shelley's title page. Prometheus made humans from clay and stole fire for them, and was punished for it.
"Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains / One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk"
Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale". Lethe is the river of forgetting in the underworld.
"Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door"
Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven, stanza 7. The bird of ill omen sits on the head of Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom.
"Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!"
The Raven, stanza 14. Nepenthe is the drug Helen puts in the wine in the Odyssey: whoever drinks it "cannot shed a single tear all the rest of the day".
"Thy Naiad airs have brought me home / To the glory that was Greece, / To the grandeur that was Rome."
Poe, "To Helen", in The Complete Poetical Works. Helen of Troy in the title, water nymphs, and the classical world as the measure of beauty.
"It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, / And see the great Achilles, whom we knew."
Alfred Tennyson, "Ulysses", in Early Poems. Ulysses, old now, talks about one last voyage.
"The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king / So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale / Filled all the desert with inviolable voice"
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land. Ovid's Philomela, attacked by a king and turned into a nightingale. Eliot's own notes to the poem point to Ovid.
Allusions to Other Books and Writers
"sprang from his Platonic conception of himself"
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Chapter 6. Plato's ideal forms: Gatsby is a copy of the self he imagined.
"his career as Trimalchio was over"
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7. Trimalchio is the vulgar millionaire who throws an absurd feast in Petronius' Satyricon. Fitzgerald never explains the name.
"If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died before the play began"
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Stave 1. The ghost on the castle walls in Hamlet, used to insist that Marley really is dead before his own ghost turns up.
"Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes / He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men / Look'd at each other with a wild surmise-- / Silent, upon a peak in Darien."
Keats, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer", in Poems (1817). An allusion that misfires: the first European to see the Pacific from Darien was Balboa, not Cortés.
"(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)"
Eliot, The Waste Land. A line taken from Ariel's song about a drowned father in The Tempest, with Eliot's "Look!" added.
"Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many."
The Waste Land. The last line translates Dante's crowd of souls at the gate of Hell, in Longfellow's translation: "That ever Death so many had undone." London commuters, seen as the dead.
"Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song."
Eliot borrows the refrain of Edmund Spenser's wedding poem Prothalamion and sets it against the modern Thames.
"April is the cruellest month, breeding"
The Waste Land, the first line. Read against the happy April that opens The Canterbury Tales.
"No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; / Am an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two"
"Prufrock". He isn't the hero of the play, only one of the courtiers.
"like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle"
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Chapter 11. Perrault's Bluebeard kept a locked room hiding his dead wives, and Thornfield's third floor has a secret too.
"We were in the Slough of Despond tonight, and Mother came and pulled us out as Help did in the book."
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, Chapter 1. John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, where Christian sinks in the bog and "a man came to him, whose name was Help". For the March girls, "the book" needs no title.
"Have you gone on with Udolpho?"
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Chapter 6. Ann Radcliffe's Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho, called by its short name the way its fans would.
How to Use Allusion in Your Own Writing
- Allude to what your readers know. An allusion nobody catches is a dead spot in the sentence.
- Don't explain it. No. 28 works for both kinds of reader: those who know the Satyricon get a second layer, and the rest still follow the sentence.
- Let a character get it wrong, and make sure you don't. A garbled allusion like No. 4 is characterization. A wrong one by the writer, like No. 30, is a mistake that outlives him.
The same kind of sourced list exists for hyperbole, oxymoron and alliteration; simile and metaphor are in the figurative language examples.
Allusion FAQ
What's the difference between allusion and illusion?
An allusion is a reference. An illusion is something that fools the eye or the mind. The verb for making an allusion is "allude".
Is an allusion the same as a reference?
It's the indirect kind. "Like the Bible says" is a plain reference; "a good Samaritan" is an allusion, because it expects you to know the story.
