Rule #25: It’s My Symbol and I’ll Cry If I want To
November 1, 2016 How To Read Lit 1 comment klemay17
To use symbols (Rule):
- You must use what you know.
- Remember you know more than you think you do.
- Remember everything has meaning (but don’t ignore the obvious things).
Examples from text:
- Moby Dick
- John Donne
- The French Lieutenant’s Woman
- The Great Gatsby
- Mrs. Dalloway
- The Waste Land
- As I lay Dying
Example:
- Grey’s Anatomy – This show revolves around this girl named Meredith Grey. She’s a surgical intern at Seatle Grace Hospital in Washington state. She ends up falling in love with a resident named Derek Shepard. He ends up being married to another woman at one point, but in the end, him and Meredith ended up together. When they first moved in together, they got a nice house but then decided to move. So they lived on a new lot with a trailer they had bought. That trailer that Derek and Meredith used to live in, represented love that wasn’t going to work out. This shows when Derek proposes to Meredith in the lot of a house that the trailer is parked in, and then they end up moving into a different house instead.
- Derek ends up dying, and his sister Amelia ends up coming to live with Meredith and her kids. Amelia also works at Seatle Grace as a surgeon. She ends up falling in love with Dr.Hunt, a man who has been heart broken many times on the show. They dated for a while, but things ended up not working out. When Amelia and Hunt break up because he’s still living in the trailer, and the trailer itself then causes problems for Amelia. Showing that the trailer was trouble.
Photo credit: Asim Bijarani via Foter.com / CC BY
1 Comment
I like how you went in depth with your examples. I also like bulleted the rule and also included in examples from the text. The first thing I thought of after reading this is that when reading, people often overthink symbolism. Yes it is certainly possible to find meaning in everything, but it is more important to pick up the blatantly obvious symbols that authors throw at us. Some examples I have come across appear in The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, and many more.