Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

Symbol

Definitions

• Now the word symbol scares a good many people off, just as the word art does.  They seem to feel that a symbol is some mysterious thing put in arbitrarily by the writer to frighten the common reader--sort of a literary Masonic grip that is only for the initiated.  They seem to think that it is a way of saying something that you aren't actually saying, and so...they approach it as if it were a problem in algebra.  Find x.  And when they do find or think they find this abstraction, x, then they go off with an elaborate sense of satisfaction and the notion that they have "understood" the story...

      I think for the fiction writer himself, symbols are something he uses simply as a matter of course.  You might say that these are details that, while having their essential place in the literal level of the story, operate in depth as well as on the surface, increasing the story in every direction. (O'Connor 440)

References

O'Connor, Flannery.  "The Nature and Aim of Fiction."  1972.  The Norton Introduction to Literature.  8th ed.  Eds. Jerome Beaty, Alison Booth, J. Paul Hunter, and Kelly J. Mays.  New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.  440.

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Last updated July 28, 2008