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Chapter 15: Managing Metaphors, Similes and Symbols
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Write down a list of all the words that occur to you for each object in this list.
Think of all the associations that the objects have for you, both good and bad.
For example, for ‘egg’ I’d write: warm, white and yellow, Easter, chocolate,
chicken, yolk, crack, fragile, broken, fried, omelette, sticky, painted, shell, and
boiled egg and soldiers. For ‘ring’, I’d write: gold, wedding band, engagement,
diamond, eternity, circle, happiness, bondage, slavery, and the One Ring.
Now write a scene or story that includes one of these symbolic objects. Make
sure you include all the different levels of meaning.
Don’t be tempted to overdo the use of symbols or make them too obvious.
Symbols work best when they naturally occur in a story, so that readers may
not realise their significance until later.
Here’s an example of symbolism in a modern novel to illustrate what I mean.
It helps if you read the passage twice, once just to enjoy it, and then again to
think about any possible symbols in it:
About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily
joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink
away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes – a
fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque
gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and
rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move
dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line
of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and
comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden
spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure
operations from your sight.
But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly
over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg.
The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic – their irises are
one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous
yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently
some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the
borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or
forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless
days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
—F Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, Penguin Modern Classics, 2000,
first published 1925)
Many people see the eyes of Eckleburg as the eyes of God or of judgement.
Because the eyes look out from no face they seem to represent the death of
God, or at least of spiritual values, in the era Fitzgerald is writing about. Here
are some clues that suggest this interpretation: