Symbol is one of those frustrating things that get taught in English classes and seem five steps removed from the experience of reading a book. Heavy handed to insert obviously meaningful objects, objects that are supposed to carry more weight than the thing itself. Overwrought dependence on clichés won’t further our themes. So how do symbols work when they actually work in a narrative?
You want to start close to the real world of your book. Accurate, actual description will rise to the level of the symbolic when it needs to do so, without losing truth.
An amazing short story, “Gravity,” by David Leavitt, tells the tale of a man who is dying. He goes shopping with his mother. I am going to show you two moments in the story. The first is an action sequence. The second, five paragraphs later, is the moment in which an accurate and actual description of the character and the action rises to the symbolic. It is not heavy-handed, nor is it a reach. The thing to remember is that Theo, Sylvia’s son, is dying, and he is frail, walking with a cane.
Here is the action sequence:
[Sylvia] walked over to a large ridged crystal bowl, a very fifties sort of bowl, stalwart and square-jawed. “What do you think? Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Mom, to tell the truth, I think it’s kind of ugly.”
“Four hundred and twenty-five dollars,” Sylvia said admiringly. “You have to feel it.”
Then she picked up the bowl and tossed it to Theo, like a football.
The gentlemen in the cardigan sweaters gasped and did not exhale. When Theo caught it, it sank his hands. His cane rattled to the floor.
Isn’t that fabulous? It also reminds us that high-stakes action doesn’t have to include gunfire and speeding cars. It’s a perfect example of the extraordinary. Now, check out how the writer takes this up a notch to symbolic some paragraphs later:
It seemed Sylvia had been looking a long time for something like this, something heavy enough to leave an impression, yet so fragile it could make you sorry.
One sentence. This nails the whole story without ever leaving the truth and reality of the crystal bowl. Try it.
Tim O’Brien pulls this off in a different way in the first chapter of his novel, which is also an amazing stand-alone short story also titled, The Things They Carried.
The use of rhythm and detail in the list here allows for a shift in meaning so that an everyday action (to carry) rises to symbol. By staying grounded in a vividly specific world, the prose is allowed to lift off the ground and carry us along.
They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various roots and molds. They carried the land itself–Vietnam, the place, the soil–a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky.
It’s a sort of transcendence earned by gritting reality. Do try this at home.