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Analyzing Theme
Does the work have a theme? Is it stated or implied?
What generalization(s) or statement(s) about life or human experience does the work make?
What elements of the work contribute most heavily to the formulation of the theme?
Does the theme emerge organically and naturally, or does the author seem to force the theme upon the work?
What is the value or significance of the work’s theme? Is it topical or universal in its application?
SYMBOL AND ALLEGORY
A symbol, according to Webster’s Dictionary, is “something that stands for or suggests something else by reason of relationship, association, convention, or accidental resemblance…a visible sign of something invisible”. Symbols, in this sense, are with us all the time, for there are few words or objects that do not evoke, at least in certain contexts, a wide range of associated meanings and feelings. For example, the word home (as opposed to house conjures up feelings of warmth and security and personal associations of family, friends, and neighborhood, while the American flag suggests country and patriotism. Human beings by virtue of their capacity for language are symbol-making creatures.
Most of our daily symbol-making and symbol-reading is unconscious and accidental, the inescapable product of our experience as human-beings. In literature, however, symbols – in the form of words, images, objects, settings, events and characters – are often used deliberately to suggest and reinforce meaning, to provide enrichment by enlarging and clarifying the experience of the work, and to help to organize and unify the whole. William York Tindall likens a literary symbol to “a metaphor one half of which remains unstated and indefinite”. The analogy is a good one. Although symbols exist first as something literal and concrete within the work itself, they also have the capacity to call to mind a range of invisible and abstract associations, both intellectual and emotional, that transcend the literal and concrete and extend their meaning. A literary symbol brings together what is material and concrete within the work (the visible half of Tinsdall’s metaphor) with its series of associations (that “which remains unstated and indefinite”); by fusing them, however briefly, in the reader's imagination, new layers and dimensions of meaning, suggestiveness, and significance are added.
The identification and understanding of literary symbols require a great deal from the reader. They demand awareness and intelligence: an ability to detect when the emphasis an author places on certain elements within the work can be legitimately said to carry those elements to larger, symbolic levels, and when the author means to imply nothing beyond what is literally stated. They also make demands on the reader’s maturity and sophistication, for only when we are sufficiently experienced with the world will the literal and concrete strike an appropriate symbolic chord. If, that is to say, we have not had the occasion to think much or think deeply about life and experience it is not likely that we will be able to detect, much less understand, the larger hidden meanings to which symbols point. As Tindall observes, “What the reader gets from a symbol depends not only upon what the author has put into it but upon the reader’s sensivity and his consequent apprehension of what is there”.
However, there are dangers as well. Although the author’s use of symbol may be unconscious, ours is an age in which the conscious and deliberate use of symbolism defines much of our literary art, as the criticism of the past forty years amply bears witness. There is, consequently, a tendency among students of literature, especially beginning students, to forget that all art contains a mixture of both the literal and the symbolic meanings where none are intended or pushes the interpretation of legitimate symbols beyond what is reasonable and proper. Both temptations must be avoided.
It is perfectly true, of course, that the meaning of any symbol is, by definition, indefinite and open-ended, and that a given symbol will evoke a slightly different response in different readers, no matter how discriminating. Yet there is an acceptable range of possible readings for any symbol beyond which we must not stray. We are always limited in our interpretation of symbols by the total context of elements, and we are not free to impose – from the outside – our own personal and idiosyncratic meanings simply because they appeal to us. Finally, in working with symbols we must careful to avoid the danger of becoming so preoccupied with the larger significance of meaning that we forget the literal importance of the concrete thing being symbolized. Moby Dick, for all he may be said to represent to Ahab, Ishmael, Starbuck, Flask, Stubb, Herman Melvill, and finally to the reader, is still a whale, a living, breathing mammal of the deep that is capable of inflicting crushing damage on those who pursue him too closely.
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