In novel the surface meaning is different from the symbolic meaning

SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. The free trial period is the first 7 days of your subscription. TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION AND AVOID BEING CHARGED, YOU MUST CANCEL BEFORE THE END OF THE FREE TRIAL PERIOD. You may cancel your subscription on your Subscription and Billing page or contact Customer Support at The Wallpaper “The Yellow Wallpaper” is driven by the narrator’s sense that the wallpaper is a text she must interpret, that it symbolizes something that affects her directly. Accordingly, the wallpaper develops its symbolism throughout the story. At first it seems merely unpleasant: it is ripped, soiled, and an “unclean yellow.” The worst part is the ostensibly formless pattern, which fascinates the narrator as she attempts to figure out how it is organized. After staring at the paper for hours, she sees a ghostly sub-pattern behind the main pattern, visible only in certain light. Eventually, the sub-pattern comes into focus as a desperate woman, constantly crawling and stooping, looking for an escape from behind the main pattern, which has come to resemble the bars of a cage. The narrator sees this cage as festooned with the heads of many women, all of whom were strangled as they tried to escape. Clearly, the wallpaper represents the structure of family, medicine, and tradition in which the narrator finds herself trapped. Wallpaper is domestic and humble, and Gilman skillfully uses this nightmarish, hideous paper as a symbo...

Narrative method and Where there is a story, there is a The Seeking the most objective narrative method of all, The problem of a satisfactory narrative point of view is, in fact, nearly insoluble. The careful exclusion of comment, the limitation of vocabulary to a sort of reader’s lowest common denominator, the paring of style to the absolute minimum—these puritanical devices work well for an Don Quixote, and Nabokov, in Lolita (1955), join hands across four centuries in finding most satisfactory the device of the fictitious editor who presents a manuscript story for which he disclaims responsibility. But this highly useful method presupposes in the true author a scholarly, or The Literary World Scope, or dimension No novel can theoretically be too long, but if it is too short it ceases to be a novel. It may or may not be accidental that the novels most highly regarded by the world are of considerable length—Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Dickens’ David Copperfield, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, and so on. On the other hand, since ficciones of the Argentine The Loved One (1948). It would seem that there are two ways of presenting human character—one, the brief way, through a significant episode in the life of a personage or group of personages; the other, which admits of limitless length, through the presentation of a large section of a life or lives, sometimes beginning with birth and ending in No other cognate...

Foster says that if you’re wondering whether something in a piece of literature is a symbol, it’s pretty safe to say that yes, it is. What’s rarely clear is the exact symbolic meaning. In fact, symbols that only have one specific meaning aren’t technically symbols at all, but allegories. George Orwell’s An allegory is a text (or image) that has a hidden meaning beyond the story being told on the surface. Although this is similar to a symbol, the important distinction is that allegories have a single meaning that the reader (or viewer) is supposed to discover. Allegories are not designed to produce multiple interpretations that people will argue over, but rather to lead the reader through clues to find the one “true” meaning. Even when it seems likely that a given symbol will have a fixed, consistent meaning, this is in fact rarely the case. Mark Twain, Hart Crane, and T.S. Eliot are all male Midwestern authors who, despite coming from different generations, were at one point all alive at the same time. All three feature rivers in their writing—and yet in each case, the river takes on a completely different meaning. This is not to say that there is never any overlap or intertextual resonance, but that a river in one work can have a totally distinct and contradictory meaning from the same river in another. Here Foster identifies one method of deducing meaning from a work of literature—considering historical context and intertextual connections—while showing that this method ...

Of all the literary devices examined within the book, symbol and metaphor are arguably the most important. Although they have similar meanings, there is an important distinction between them. A symbol is something that, within the context of a literary work, has a different meaning or meanings from its literal or primary one. A metaphor, meanwhile, is a figure of speech in which an idea is conveyed in an indirect, non-literal way. For example, in a particular poem flowers might be a symbol of natural beauty, or female sexuality, or renewal (or all three!). The “flower of youth,” on the other hand, is a Biblical metaphor for virginity. Foster stresses that objects, images, and even acts and events within literature usually have a symbolic meaning beyond their literal significance within a text. Once readers get accustomed to using the symbolic imagination—in other words, being alert to symbolic meaning—their understanding of literature will be transformed. The importance of identifying symbol and metaphor underpins almost all the different reading strategies covered in each distinct chapter of the book. The chapters on quests, eating scenes, vampires, the Bible, seasons, and so on all primarily deal with symbolic or metaphorical meaning, even as they examine very different frameworks for how to identify symbols and what these symbols signify. In Chapter 3, for example, Foster explores how certain symbolic objects link Foster also addresses symbol specifically in Chapters 12...

• Traffic lights: Red light means stop, green means go, and yellow means caution • The arrow means "this way" • A cross represents religion, or more specifically, Christianity • Light bulb means "new idea" • Numerals 1 and 0, put together, mean ten • A heart means love • Logos represent brands, like the Nike swoosh or Mac's Apple • Even our names are symbols that represent us as individual humans Symbols can hold unexpected meaning, but upon further investigation, can make a lot of sense. For example, if you read a scene that involves a skunk lurking in the background, you might wonder what that animal could signify. But, if there's something that foul in the works of your story, like a breakup or a bit of bad luck, the skunk begins to bring up imagery of something that is less than pleasant to experience. Thus, the symbolism. What is a motif? While a symbol might occur once in literature to signify an idea or an emotion, a motif can be an element or idea that repeats throughout that piece of literature. It is closely related to a theme but is more of a supporting role to the theme than a theme itself. It is within the pattern of repetition that the power and impact of a motif are found. A motif could, in fact, be expressed by a collection of related symbols. How do symbols and motifs work together? Since multiple symbols can be used to explain a motif, let's break down a few examples. Let's say we have a story about a family struggling to stay together, parents considerin...

The pearl is a complicated symbol. It highlights different themes and gathers new meaning as the plot progresses. When Kino first opens the oyster in which it lies, the pearl seems to signify that God is looking favorably on Kino and Juana. It soon becomes clear, however, that finding the pearl is not good fortune at all. Rather, it surfaces the evil and greedy impulses of everyone that comes into contact with it and thus symbolizes the materialism and selfishness of man’s desires. It represents, too, the arbitrariness of value and the capacity of an economic system to prevent those who are powerless from rising above their present state. Created by an accident with a grain of sand, the pearl is assigned a price—the lowest price possible—by conspiring pearl-dealers. Kino is cheated in this system because he is not powerful enough (and is assumed to be too ignorant) to see through the scandal and fight it. “In the town they tell the story of the great pearl—how it was found and how it was lost again. They tell of Kino, the fisherman, and of his wife, Juana, and of the baby, Coyotito. And because the story has been told so often, it has taken root in every man’s mind…If this story is a parable, perhaps everyone takes his own meaning from it and reads his own life into it. In any case, they say in the town that…” The essence of pearl mixed with the essence of men and a curious dark residue was precipitated. Every man suddenly became related to Kino’s pearl, and Kino’s pearl w...