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We speak student!

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Power in Literature:

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Symbols

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à la Shmoop.

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Alright and we’re rollin

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Hi from Shmoop global headquarters here in Mountain View, California

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This video is about helping you understand literature

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from a unique perspective.

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You have to understand some basic concepts:

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symbols, setting, and themes, among other things.

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And we’re here talking with Deb Tennen who’s our chief guru

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and literary analysis and all things creative here at Shmoop.

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So Deb, why don't we start with the key concept here,

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what is a symbol?

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Okay, in the most basic sense, a symbol is

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a tangible or concrete object

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that represents an abstract idea. That’s it.

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The symbol can be an actual object, like say

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you wear your grandmother’s necklace

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that she gave you when she passed away, you wear the necklace,

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the necklace is a necklace but it symbolizes

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your love for your grandmother.

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It can also be a person, a person can be a symbol

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of hope if someone has had a really hard life and they've struggled through a lot

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you look up to that person that person has been a symbol for hope

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and perseverance in your life so those are symbols in our everyday lives

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they're really all around us.

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Why do authors use symbols?

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Because symbols are all around us everyday in our lives

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a lot of them will happen accidentally. A writer will just write something

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that they think of as a normal occurrence in their everyday life and then

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a reader will read into it as a symbol because for that specific reader

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it means something, you know,

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more powerful than the author intended it

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but authors will also intentionally use symbols

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that's so that they can be a little more subtle

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In the example of the Great Gatsby, which

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has one of the most famous symbols in all of literature, that green light

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you have Gatsby standing at the edge of a dock, looking out, and he has his hands outstretched

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Nick just says, Gatsby had his hands outstretched,

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toward the green light, across the water.

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Green typically is the color of money,

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and so it's very easy to almost purposely have

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quote misled us a little bit so that we would go with

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the materialistic interpretation

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Yeah, and it’s actually interesting just to rewind a little bit

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when Great Gatsby came out

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it was actually just around the time that stoplights

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became a thing so the green light is actually really complicated one

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because it does represent both the future and the past

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we have Gatsby, you know, looking across and

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basically being stuck in the past this dream of Daisy that he'll never get

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but it's also about you know moving toward

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the future, it could go either way.

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And it's up to the reader to decide which it means

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or maybe it means both.

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Give us one other symbol

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and then let's move on to the actual

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implementation of them.

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Another symbol in a book that a lot of you might have read is the mockingbird in

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To Kill a Mockingbird, the titular character

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we never actually really see a specific mockingbird in the book

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but it comes up again and again in small places and

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we think of it most we think of it most when Atticus basically tells his kids

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"Don't kill the mockingbird," it's basically that

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mockingbirds are these innocent birds they’re not doing anything wrong,

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so we wouldn't kill one.

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The same kinda goes then we extend it to Boo Radley, like don’t bug him,

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he’s just an innocent guy and we’re supposed to slowly realize that

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throughout the book that he too is a Mockingbird

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and then of course Tom Robinson is another mockingbird

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this innocent guy who, he’s handicapped

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we think of him as kind of this innocent guy who can’t really

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defend himself and so he's another Mockingbird

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and he actually does get shot.

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Where is there an overuse of symbols?

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One poor use of symbolism can be when a writer

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forgets that a symbol is also the object that it is.

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For example, we have an apple

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as a symbol of original sin, whatever else you wanna associate with that

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we think of all the fairy tales where the apple is poison,

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we think of Adam and Eve, etc.

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But the apple is also an apple. It’s not just a symbol of something

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So writers, bad writers,

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or writers who haven’t learned this will kind of pull symbols and be like

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“Oh, I can have this object represent this abstract idea” but then they forget that

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the object is also the object and it needs to serve a purpose in the story.

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If it doesn’t make sense in context to have that specific object,

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then the symbol kind of just becomes a little icky.

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How do people recognize symbols?

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The idea is that readers pull out the symbolism themselves, so

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one reader might the apple as just an apple but another who has

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experience reading a lot of biblical literature

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or you know grew up on fairy tales they're gonna read different things into it

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different cultures will also read different symbols in new ways

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so, you know a writer is writing

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to a very specific group of people, but then if someone

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from a different culture comes along and reads it,

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then they might pull something completely different from it.

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Got it, understood.

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What is a symbol?

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Why do authors use symbols?

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Where is there an overuse of symbols?

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How do people recognize symbols?

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