Doris Lessing’s story, Through the tunnel, shows many examples of symbolic and literal meanings. When Jerry and his mother first arrived on vacation he saw the wild bay and the safe beech. The wild bay symbolizes adolescence for Jerry and the safe beech symbolizes his young childhood years. The literal meaning to the wild bay and the safe beech is basically a wild bay and a safe beech. When Jerry was at the safe beech his mother was there to watch him and help him, so it’s practically his childhood. Jerry moves into adolescence by going to the wild bay alone, without his mother to watch him. He sees the older boys and wanted their acceptance to be like them and to feel their age. He then realizes that they can hold their breath for a minute
Symbolism: generally is an object representing another to give it an entirely different meaning that is much deeper and more significant. On page 56 the prisoners skim the ground for a piece of bread. The bread in this situation represents hope prisoners have. Hope to live, hope to eat, and hope to make it out alive. On pages 24-26 the readers see that Mrs. Schächter goes insane during the depression, she starts screaming she sees flames on the train, the flames represent the soon to come loss of faith and loss of hope for survival in some cases. Symbolism helps readers see the deeper and more emotional meaning of Wiesel's memoir.
There’s a lot of literary techniques used in “How to read literature like a professor”. One of the techniques is symbolism. In chapter 12 it talks about someone walking on a road and they encounter two roads that diverge into the woods. There’s a road that everyone uses and then there’s one that almost no one uses and he decides to take that road for some reason. “Two roads diverged into a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference”. To me this symbolizes freedom and decision making. Everyone has to make decisions in their lives ranging from what to eat during lunch to life changing decisions
Many people assume that people are just people, we have no intentional meaning, but that’s not really the case. This is seen the historical fiction novel, The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963, by Christopher Paul Curtis when The Watsons were traumatized over the bombing at Joetta’s church. The author uses symbolism to convey the message that maturity comes with time because with impactful events and people, you have to adapt.
An example of this can be found in the short story, The Grave, written by Katherine Anne Porter. In this short story two young kids, a brother and sister, go out exploring in a graveyard. “...propped their twenty two Winchester rifles carefully against the rail fence, climbed over and explored among the graves.”(Porter 2) The symbolism is the two kids climbing over the fence. The fence acts as the barrier between the two worlds of childhood and adulthood. Them climbing over it represents the transition that young kids go through when becoming adults. Later in the story the brother kills a pregnant bunny. When they discover that the bunny was about to have babies the sister feels guilt. “She was quietly and terribly agitated, standing with her rifle under her arm, looking down at the bloody heap.” (Porter 11) The reader can see that there is symbolism with the young girl holding the gun under her arm and her looking down at the dead
In the short story "Through the Tunnel", Doris Lessing describes the adventure of Jerry, a young English boy trying to swim through an underwater tunnel. Throughout the story, the author uses the third person omniscient point of view to describe the boy's surroundings and to show us both what he and the other characters are thinking and what is happening around them. By using this point of view, the author is able to describe the setting of the story, give a detailed description of the characters, and make the theme visible.
In the story “Through the Tunnel” by Doris Lessing the main character Jerry is young and sees a group boys do something that he finds interesting, Going through the tunnel. The problem is he is too young and too weak to do it. The boys were Judging and excluding him and it made him sad. Jerry used the negative actions of the french boys as motivation to set a goal of swimming through the tunnel before he leaves. Although Jerry is not physically strong or mature he has a large amount of mental strength and uses what should be his weakness be his strength.
Another example of symbolism is Arthur “Boo” Radley. The town ridicules and disregards him from society due to his incapability to socialise outside of his home. He is portrayed a scary and dangerous individual and the children of Maycomb have been raised to fear him. If only Maycomb would take the time to see through Boo Radley’s perspective then they might not refer to him as a “malevolent phantom”. Ultimately Boo saves Jem and scout from Bob Ewell and proves to be the ultimate symbol of good. The lesson being told here is that people should not be so easily judged.
A part of maturing is finally doing things independently without the supervision from parents. In her short story, “Through the Tunnel”, Doris Lessing conveys the concept of maturing through becoming self-sufficient. Lessing uses characterization and symbolism to show that being self-reliant is a part of growing up.
One example of this is when the lady on the train kept yelling “fire!”. She continued to say she saw fire, even though nobody else saw this. Everyone on the train thought she was crazy. This woman was very afraid that she might be burned by the fire she saw. I think that this event could symbolize the fear that everyone had during the Holocaust. Another example of symbolism in this book is all the dead bodies laying around in the end of the book. Towards the end of the book there are lots of bodies lying around that have not been disposed of. I think that this event could symbolise how the people in the camps that were still alive had lost all of their humanity. This can cause the reader to have a feeling of fear when they read the book
But soon she realized that you can’t be in control of everything when she accidently burnt down a hotel. Another example of symbolism is The Joshua Tree. Rose Mary, Jeanette’s mother, is a believer of independency and wants her children to take care of themselves so that they can overcome difficulties which will be worth the struggle in the end. Rose Mary loves the Joshua Tree because of its struggle to grow and its beauty, she says, “it’s the Joshua’s Trees struggle that gives it beauty” (The Glass Castle, pg. 38). The struggle in both the Joshua Tree and children help them to become firm and well rooted in their beliefs and morals.
Have you ever noticed something in a book that didn’t seem like much on the surface, but the more you thought about it it became clearer that it actually had a deeper meaning, well that is symbolism. The first story is called,“Harrison Bergeron”. The second story is called,”2BR02B”. The third story is called,”The Lottery”.In this informational essay, you will be given examples of symbolism in three different stories.In this informational essay, you will be given many examples of symbolism in these three stories.
Symbolism in stories is dependent on how the author writes, the title, and the characters. Titles in literature are very important to the symbolism of a story an example of this is Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”. As the story goes on it shows not only the literal meaning of what they carried but also symbolically the burdens that they had mentally.
In How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Thomas C. Foster explains how every thing has a symbolic meaning but finding what the symbols stand for is where it becomes tricky. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain presents to his readers many symbols that can be easily seen for their true meaning such as the rain, fog, and fear of drowning. According to Thomas C. Foster, rain symbolizes life; fog symbolizes confusion; and drowning is always one of our deepest fears. However, there are also innumerable accounts of symbols that need to be interpreted with a lot of thought from the reader. One example can be seen in the Mississippi River. The
A personal experience that I have had with symbolism was when one of my mom’s friends was having a child and were revealing the gender. What they did was they had a cake and inside was the color blue for a boy or pink for a girl. When we sliced open the cake is what pink so that means they were having a girl. This has been the experience that I have had with symbolism in real life. This ties into the many examples of symbolism in the story “Night”.
Symbolism in literature is used to give an entirely different meaning which is more significant and much deeper to a story using objects representing other objects and giving them a sense that is different from their literal meaning. The meaning of the symbols used to depend on the reader, and there is no universal meaning for symbols used because their purpose is inherent in the symbol itself. In both stories, the authors use symbols to give different meanings to their story.