Holden Rants About a Topic That Isn’t Really Relevant But is Still Kind of Interesting: Part 1

How Much Symbolism is Too Much?

By Holden Hartle

I have the pleasure of taking a class with Mr. Griffin. He introduced the idea of symbolism to me when I was a freshman, and now I am reintroduced to it as a senior. He has opened my eyes to a whole new way of reading a story. Currently in class we are discussing short stories. Some ideas are far fetched–like a card game representing the Irish economy. The discussions we have in class explore the story beneath the story, as Mr. Griffin likes to put it.

For example, we read the story A&P by John Updike, in which a teenager quits his job as a cashier to go chase some girls in bikinis. At least, this is the story on the surface level. If you go one level deeper, the story is kind of a coming-of-age story, as the cashier quits his job because it proves that he can be autonomous. You can even go one step deeper and look at the lighting of the story. The “fake” lighting inside the store conveys the illusion that the teenager can actually go out and get these girls, but when he steps into the sunlight, or the “real” lighting, he is met with “reality” and the fact that he can’t get those girls.

But when does symbolism go too far? How deep can you look into a story before your symbolic interpretation just becomes wrong? Well, as with most cases, there are two sides to the story. One side can argue that whatever the reader can extrapolate from the story as symbolism should be taken as such, but the other side may argue that sometimes the author may just want to write something for the sake of writing it. Not all pieces of literature have to have symbolism. The common example is when an author writes, “The curtains were painted blue.” Mr. Griffin and I may look at this sentence and say that the curtains convey the protagonist’s sadness, and possibly his loneliness, when in fact the author may have just written that the curtains were blue, with no intended symbolism whatsoever.

There is another side of the story that raises an interesting question. Sometimes, symbolism reveals secrets about the author, regardless of whether or not they put it in consciously. If we use the curtain example again, what if we were to say that the curtains are blue because the author was feeling depressed at that point in time. Is that fair to say? In my opinion, no. It is unfair to extrapolate symbolism and relate it to the author, because you could stretch an idea to the point that you could say the author is a sexist for using a color primarily associated with boys.

So, yes, Mr. Griffin and the AP Literature class have a grand ol’ time “over analyzing” passages, but there is a point where symbolic analysis becomes too much. Personally, I believe that the author and the piece should remain separate entities. You, as the reader, can take whatever you want out of the story, but what you take from the story shouldn’t fall back onto the author. This has been Holden Rants About a Topic That Isn’t Really Relevant But is Still Kind of Interesting: Part 1.

Editor: AJ Patencio