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Power in Literature:
Symbols
à la Shmoop.
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Hi from Shmoop global headquarters here in Mountain View, California
This video is about helping you understand literature
from a unique perspective.
You have to understand some basic concepts:
symbols, setting, and themes, among other things.
And we’re here talking with Deb Tennen who’s our chief guru
and literary analysis and all things creative here at Shmoop.
So Deb, why don't we start with the key concept here,
what is a symbol?
Okay, in the most basic sense, a symbol is
a tangible or concrete object
that represents an abstract idea. That’s it.
The symbol can be an actual object, like say
you wear your grandmother’s necklace
that she gave you when she passed away, you wear the necklace,
the necklace is a necklace but it symbolizes
your love for your grandmother.
It can also be a person, a person can be a symbol
of hope if someone has had a really hard life and they've struggled through a lot
you look up to that person that person has been a symbol for hope
and perseverance in your life so those are symbols in our everyday lives
they're really all around us.
Why do authors use symbols?
Because symbols are all around us everyday in our lives
a lot of them will happen accidentally. A writer will just write something
that they think of as a normal occurrence in their everyday life and then
a reader will read into it as a symbol because for that specific reader
it means something, you know,
more powerful than the author intended it
but authors will also intentionally use symbols
that's so that they can be a little more subtle
In the example of the Great Gatsby, which
has one of the most famous symbols in all of literature, that green light
you have Gatsby standing at the edge of a dock, looking out, and he has his hands outstretched
Nick just says, Gatsby had his hands outstretched,
toward the green light, across the water.
Green typically is the color of money,
and so it's very easy to almost purposely have
quote misled us a little bit so that we would go with
the materialistic interpretation
Yeah, and it’s actually interesting just to rewind a little bit
when Great Gatsby came out
it was actually just around the time that stoplights
became a thing so the green light is actually really complicated one
because it does represent both the future and the past
we have Gatsby, you know, looking across and
basically being stuck in the past this dream of Daisy that he'll never get
but it's also about you know moving toward
the future, it could go either way.
And it's up to the reader to decide which it means
or maybe it means both.
Give us one other symbol
and then let's move on to the actual
implementation of them.
Another symbol in a book that a lot of you might have read is the mockingbird in
To Kill a Mockingbird, the titular character
we never actually really see a specific mockingbird in the book
but it comes up again and again in small places and
we think of it most we think of it most when Atticus basically tells his kids
"Don't kill the mockingbird," it's basically that
mockingbirds are these innocent birds they’re not doing anything wrong,
so we wouldn't kill one.
The same kinda goes then we extend it to Boo Radley, like don’t bug him,
he’s just an innocent guy and we’re supposed to slowly realize that
throughout the book that he too is a Mockingbird
and then of course Tom Robinson is another mockingbird
this innocent guy who, he’s handicapped
we think of him as kind of this innocent guy who can’t really
defend himself and so he's another Mockingbird
and he actually does get shot.
Where is there an overuse of symbols?
One poor use of symbolism can be when a writer
forgets that a symbol is also the object that it is.
For example, we have an apple
as a symbol of original sin, whatever else you wanna associate with that
we think of all the fairy tales where the apple is poison,
we think of Adam and Eve, etc.
But the apple is also an apple. It’s not just a symbol of something
So writers, bad writers,
or writers who haven’t learned this will kind of pull symbols and be like
“Oh, I can have this object represent this abstract idea” but then they forget that
the object is also the object and it needs to serve a purpose in the story.
If it doesn’t make sense in context to have that specific object,
then the symbol kind of just becomes a little icky.
How do people recognize symbols?
The idea is that readers pull out the symbolism themselves, so
one reader might the apple as just an apple but another who has
experience reading a lot of biblical literature
or you know grew up on fairy tales they're gonna read different things into it
different cultures will also read different symbols in new ways
so, you know a writer is writing
to a very specific group of people, but then if someone
from a different culture comes along and reads it,
then they might pull something completely different from it.
Got it, understood.
What is a symbol?
Why do authors use symbols?
Where is there an overuse of symbols?
How do people recognize symbols?