Image, Metaphor,

Symbol
A Craft Exercise
Used judiciously, symbolic or metaphorical imagery can help
deepen the signification of a narrative, enabling readers to
access nuanced meanings or confirm interpretations.

Here are some principles about the use and application of

metaphors and symbols in fiction (from Galdon, Insight: A Study
of the Short Story).

There’s a reason why passionate love is often

symbolized by red roses, and not a bag of
There must be a recognizable
fertilizer. Red roses literally resemble engorged
labia majora and minora, thereby calling to affinity between the symbol and
the thing symbolized.
mind sex and sexuality, whereas a bag of
fertilizer is just a pile of dried brown shit.

On the other hand, can a bag a fertilizer be

made to symbolize love in a piece of fiction? The context of the literary work
Yes, if the story sets up the bag of fertilizer as
such through careful narration and must support the symbolic
interpretation so that it seems
description. A bag of fertilizer may, in fact, be a
more effective symbol than a rose if the story’s
world is one in which a bag of fertilizer belongs
more organically than a red rose. natural.
Readers often have to draw on knowledge
from other texts and fields to interpret symbols
Symbols may require special
correctly. For instance, it helps to know the
origins of the term “feet of clay” to grasp the knowledge to interpret them.
significance of the titular character’s name in
Juan Gatbonton’s “Clay.”

Works of fiction do not depend on symbols to

communicate their meaning. At best, symbols
However, literary works can still be
only enhance the interpretation and the
reading experience. understood even if the symbol is
not detected by the reader.
Related to the above. In a sense, symbols are
rewards for more careful or perceptive readers, Symbols do not change the
essential meaning of a text; they
but the story and its foundational meaning
should be accessible to all readers.

support it.
Not everything in a story is a symbol. Deal
with it. Narratives will often signal the Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
presence of symbols by emphasis through
repetition. Seek out the pattern before
pouncing on the symbol.

In the famous closing paragraph of the story,
Polotan reprises images from earlier in the
story. There is mention of a wooden bird, and
of wet and wilted ruffles. Their earlier
highlighting in the story calls attention to their
significance.
The dove makes its appearance in this earlier
scene. The long descriptive passage focuses
attention on the paperweight, calling attention
to it. Although the passage describes a
paperweight, its particulars beg for a
comparison with Miss Mijares herself—a lonely
spinster made grotesque by having love and
sex denied to her by circumstance. When it
topples over, her hysterical reaction indicates
that she recognizes the parallels herself.
However, the new man in her life—the
carpenter—manages to fix the bird, rendering
it no longer grotesque, but beautiful. And he
does so by screwing it. Could it be that he
might also “fix” Miss Mijares with a good
screwing? The story’s final paragraph above
hints at the answer. “Dove” is also a significant
image, evoking the Holy Spirit, which aligns
with “virgin” and “carpenter.”
The ruffles make their first appearance in this
passage. Their function in her attire, along
with the crucial adjective “camouflaging,”
which evokes soldiers in battle, indicates their
function as a defensive armor, protecting her
insecurities from the world.
Later in the story, the carpenter crucially
pierces through her armor, or at least she feels
that he has.
In the ruffles’ penultimate appearance, they
are described as crumpled at a moment when
her regular jeepney route goes off course and
she finds herself in unfamiliar territory, her
armor ineffectual. The jeepney route between
her work and home is another recurring image
in the story, standing for the sad routine of her
lonely life disrupted by the arrival of the
carpenter.
Page 2 of 3
Symbolic imagery in action
Let’s take a look at an example. Below are excerpts from Kerima
Polotan’s “The Virgin” (1952).
In her secret heart, Miss Mijares's young dreams fluttered faintly to
life, seeming monstrous in the rain, near this man—seeming
monstrous but sweet, overwhelming. I must get away, she thought
wildly, but he had moved and brushed against her, and where his
touch had fallen, her flesh leaped, and she recalled how his hands
had looked that first day, lain tenderly on the edge of her desk and
about the wooden bird (that had looked like a moving, shining dove)
and she turned to him with her ruffles wet and wilted, in the dark
she turned to him.
....................................
In his hands, he held her paperweight, an old gift from long ago, a
heavy wooden block on which stood, as though poised for flight, an
undistinguished, badly done bird. It had come apart recently. The
screws beneath the block had loosened so that lately it had stood
upon her desk with one wing tilted unevenly, a miniature eagle or
swallow? felled by time before it could spread its wings. She had
laughed and laughed that day it had fallen on her desk, plop! "What
happened? What happened?" they had asked her, beginning to
laugh, and she had said, caught between amusement and sharp
despair, "Some one shot it," and she had laughed and laughed till
faces turned and eyebrows rose and she told herself, whoa, get a
hold, a hold, a hold!
He had turned it and with a penknife tightened the screws and
dusted it. In this man's hands, cupped like that, it looked suddenly
like a dove.
....................................
Where she sat alone at one of the cafeteria tables, Miss Mijares did
not look 34. She was slight, almost bony, but she had learned early
how to dress herself to achieve an illusion of hips and bosom. She
liked poufs and shirrings and little girlish pastel colors. On her
bodice, astride or lengthwise, there sat an inevitable row of thick
camouflaging ruffles that made her look almost as though she had
a bosom, if she bent her shoulders slightly and inconspicuously
drew her neckline open to puff some air into her bodice.
....................................
She looked at him sharply, feeling the malice in his voice. "I'd do it
for any one," she said and turned away, angry and also ashamed, as
though he had found out suddenly that the ruffles on her dress
rested on a flat chest.
....................................
The driver stopped at a corner that looked like a little known part of
the boulevard she passed each day and she alighted and stood on
a street island, the passing headlights playing on her, a tired, shaken
woman, the ruffles on her skirt crumpled, the hemline of her skirt
awry.