163 thoughts on “Famous Novelists on Symbolism in Their Work and Whether It Was Intentional”

1. I thought Romeo and Juliet were stupid. Two teenagers so overcome with lust and confusing it with true love that they kill themselves over it? Dumbasses.

2. A Tale of Two Cities is awesome.

3. I guess you haven't been around any 14 or 15 year-olds who are in love for the first time, eh?

4. I still hate Romeo and Juliet. But rereading as an adult I love 1984, A Tale of Two Cities and especially, Animal Farm.
   Don’t think I will ever like The Great Gatsby though.

5. Thank you for this post!! I felt the exact same way in high school, and then I felt kinda guilty years later, like I was a twerp who missed out because of my bad attitude. (Okay, probably that was part of it.) But seriously, the approach in English classes can really destroy the magic of just enjoying a book and not looking behind the curtain to try and analyze why you enjoyed it.
   I read Hamlet in high school and hated it. (“Resent,” your word choice, is exactly it.) Then, a few years back, I watched the Kenneth Branagh version (in a bid to watch everything Rufus Sewell – Branagh’s Fortinbras – has been in. I adored it and have since been on a Hamlet journey, watching every version I can find, digging into earlier versions of Hamlet, just reveling in the real pleasure there is in the experience.
   There’s a lot to be enjoyed in studying for pleasure, once the pressure is off.

6. I reread Gatsby & To Kill a Mockingbird (both, Junior English) every year. And I now ADORE Shakespeare – love what you said there. Don’t think I’ll give Beowulf another shot, though. Sorry, Mr. Ladner.

7. ANIMAL FARM was lost on me the first time I read it. ROMEO & JULIET was also not a home run (I was all like, “just kill them bitch-ass Montagues and be done with it! That’s what Rambo would do.).
   You summed up my high school English literature experiences perfectly. A book wasn’t a book, a story wasn’t a story, it was some dude/chick trying to secretly tell me the meaning of life and what I should and should not believe in. I always thought it was BS, that intentionally sparse works led to analysis, which in turn gave people a reason to have jobs. If the book is just a book, there’s no need for teachers and professors and critics to tell you what it really means, right?
   Well, ANIMAL FARM is kind of bad-ass if you read it when you’re older. So is anything by Billy Shakes.
   The biggest one for me, though? DUNE. I read it at 13 and had no idea what was going on. I read it again at 23 and it permanently changed my outlook on creating fiction.

8. The things that are often overlooked in R&J is A.) The brutal, youthful gang violence, and B.) most of the mistakes are made by the adults. I always thought playing the romantic edge was a mistake, playing the terrible parenting part makes more sense to me.

9. Good on you for going back and re-reading them on your own terms.
   Loved 1984 and Brave New World as well.
   There were some great stories I read in highschool that I wish I could find back but can’t remember the name of for the life of me.
   Nice to see you encouraging reading 😀 <3

10. This made me laugh out loud!
    I was in a science fiction literature class, and we were reading a Roger Zelazny story, and the professor had some far fetched ideas as to the symbolism used and the true meaning of the story…
    One weekend during the span of the class, I went to a convention featuring (guess who); Roger Zelazny! So I asked him about the story, its symbolism and its meaning. He said, in no uncertain terms, “Your professor is full of sh*t.”
    I gleefully reported back to my professor the exchange with the author on the following Monday. My professor had the nerve to defend himself thusly;
    “Those social conditions I mentioned *were* an influence on the author, he just didn’t know it.”
    Sometimes, you just can’t win…

11. I have. Teacher. Glad I don’t have to teach it. I liked it better as a 9th grader than as an adult.

12. My experience with Great Expectations was totally different, because reading it practically became an act of rebellion against an English teacher I hated. For class, we were assigned to read the first eight chapters and the last chapter, and then we moved on to something else. (This was typical – our Romeo and Juliet unit consisted of reading a couple scenes and then watching the movie.) I decided I liked Great Expectations well enough to go ahead and read the whole thing. When my teacher realized that one of her fourteen-year-old students had read ALL of Great Expectations FOR FUN, she was so flabbergasted she didn’t know how to react.

13. In high school, there were some books I couldn’t stand, not because we were instructed to wring the meaning out of them, but as a result of them being the subject of class reading. With each of us pupils being told to take turns to read a section out loud, I’m sure it was as embarrassing for them as it was excruciatingly slow for me.
    One such book was “Of Mice and Men”. I dreaded the moments when the teacher would bring out the book, because for the rest of the class, the air would be filled with stilted reading and mispronunciation. None of it was really the kids’ fault, but I couldn’t ever see how this exercise was intended to improve and educate us. It certainly didn’t help me to actually enjoy the story.
    About a year or so ago, I took the time to read the book to myself, at the urging of a Steinbeck enthusiast. With the flow of the story uninhibited, I was finally able to love the book, and I felt a lot better for it.

14. Thanks, Wil, for writing about this! It gives me hope! I’m a middle school teacher who thinks that the *love* of reading should be taught more than deep analyzation. My test questions (when I actually have tests…) speak to more of what my students thought about the book and how they connect with it more than looking for the symbols or what the author was trying to “say.” For the record, 1984 was not required reading at my high school, but I read it on my own and did a report on it for my English class. I didn’t read Brave New World until after college. A reread of The Great Gatsby is on my list before the movie comes out at Christmastime. Thanks to ALL of you commenters that love reading! 🙂 ~Rachel Pierson

15. I think this happens with a lot of people. I noticed it most in poetry where you had to explain every little detail as adding to the overall message. Sometimes alliteration is used just because it sounds nice.
    I’m not a huga fan of Romeo and Juliet though, too many people blindly think of it as the greatest love story ever told when it’s just a depiction of teenage infatuation. And the man wrote better plays and it annoys me that R&J ALWAYS gets the limelight (either that, or Hamlet).
    And I have to ask: What’s so great (ha) about The Great Gatsby? I keep hearing people hail it was wonderful and as a (sometimes THE) great american novel. I read it and it was… ok. Certainly not bad but nothing struck me as special. I was most interested in the relationship between Nick and… whoever she was, but that hardly got any mention. I guess it’s possible that to appreciate it you need to be American or really aware of the culture Fitzgerald was portraying, but I can’t help feeling like I missed something while reading it.

16. Yes. Literature in two languages, with five teachers, and always the same problem. Plus some choice-of-material issues, particularly in case of the teacher who made us read not one, but two books about sexually frustrated men in their midlife crisis, which is just awesomely interesting when you’re a teenage girl, and gets even better in the case where the protagonist hooks up with someone who’s barely older than you are, and also his daughter.
    One event that stuck out in my mind was when we had started on Macbeth, and the teacher asked what the line “when the battle’s lost and won” means. He didn’t like the suggestion that it was non-information like you find in prophecies (“if you go to war, you will destroy a great country”, or what it was), and he actually had the whole class repeat the approved interpretation of “Nothing is as it seems” in chorus.
    The whole thing left me with the idea that critics and anyone writing or reading Literature being were snobs who only valued encoded secret messages in writing, and looked down on anyone reading for the actual stories.
    I did the re-reading thing with The Great Gatsby, and still hated it.
    Doctor Jekyll And Mister Hyde was neat.
    Another classic (not one I read in school, though) I enjoyed a lot was The Phantom Of The Opera.

17. I think a lot of one’s enjoyment of required books is dependent on the teacher.
    Senior year was rough for me and one of the things that helped me survive was my English teacher and the way she taught (specifically Hamlet). I adore that play. But other years the reading was just painful and yes resentful.
    Reading should be FUN. It’d be nice if more schools would remember that.

18. I tend to be the reader who just wants to escape for a bit and find out what happens to the characters. In English class, I was always more like “oh, I can see where you got that — now that you’ve laid it out for me.” My answer was usually something along the lines of “it was an allegory for life and/or death,” which worked particularly well for poetry.

19. I know what you mean, Wil. The intense focus on finding The Meaning in everything we read made reading for school a real chore, and that’s speaking as someone who absolutely devoured books outside of school as a kid. I was lucky enough to have a teacher my junior year of high school who spent much less time worrying about The Meaning and much more time getting us to appreciate the art and craftsmanship in so many of the classics.
    I ended up reading the Great Gatsby multiple times while we were studying it, and not minding a bit. If I remember correctly, Fitzgerald revised it 30+ times, mailing the manuscript back and forth from Paris to his editor in New York. There’s scarcely a wasted word, and he has a wonderful way with language.
    I’m thankful she managed to make the whole year as enjoyable as she did. I still spit when I hear Henry James’ name, though. Can’t win ’em all, I guess. 🙂

20. That’s part of the point of being able to take away your own interpretation from a work of art though. If Boltahm had a different experience as a teenager that doesn’t make his experience of Romeo and Juliet any less valid than yours, or the board of educations expected interpretation.
    Personally, Ophelia flinging herself into the lake has always irritated the hell out of me, but I love Titus Andronicus.

21. That’s totally me as well. Hated trying to find the “right” answer on reading comprehension tests, but love to read. One year I kept track of all the books that I read, and it was over 150 in 12 months. I even ended up doing a library and info studies degree, but to this day I still can’t bring myself to bother reading the “classics”. Mostly because I find them horribly dull. Well written, sure. But boring.
    Give me urban fantasy/scifi over Jane Austen any day! lol

22. Amen!!! I’m a rabid reader but the over examination of novels in school took the fun and enjoyment out of it. College for me was even worse, my school was big on making everyone take a certain stream of liberal arts, even as a science major, which was fine because I loved reading but I hated my classes because everything was spent discussing meanings and symbolism that I just couldn’t see – I wanted to enjoy the story! I went on my own personal Russian literature kick in college (it went nicely with the dark cold Chicago winters) and enjoyed a whole bunch of books that school would have ruined for me.

23. As a young actor, it *killed* me to have to listen to my classmates read Romeo and Juliet aloud in 9th grade. I asked the teacher if I could read it aloud, and she made a big production of humiliating me in front of the class, because I was an actor who wanted to read it.
    I really hated that woman. She was a giant asshole.

24. See, and I never thought Ophelia threw herself in the lake. I thought she was just so far gone at that point that she was in some kind of delerium and fell in the lake. Interpretations abound! 🙂

25. I’m a college English teacher, if you’re interested in my POV. I also write fiction, though the people who accepted my work promptly went out of business. I’m getting a Ph.D. in literature studies.
    OK, enough of that. What you’re describing in high school English classes is all too common, and it’s because high school is often taught toward some kind of test, even back in the 80s. So teachers have to drill the “right” answers into students so they don’t fail the SATs and the like.
    The best people I know teaching high school, and most of the people I know teaching college English do what I try to do — offer a set of tools to get more out of the stuff you read (and “read” can mean movies and video games and anything, even an advertisement). I incorporate mysteries and scifi in my literature class, as well as a day on video games and how their reader/text interaction is like and unlike books and movies.
    If you want any kind of example, I spend a week (three class periods) on Hamlet. I try to illustrate a bunch of different possible readings, like a feminist reading, a Freudian reading, and a metatextual reading (how the play is about making plays, you know). They’re all valid. All I ask students to do is offer a reading like that, backed up by actually pointing to the story or play or movie of what have you, rather than just “I didn’t like it cause it was hard to read.” I get that a lot, actually.
    Oh, and you might be interested to know a lot of people read Romeo and Juliet as a parody of the sort of soap opera-like forlorn lover plays very popular in Shakespeare’s time. Romeo and Benvolio have a few conversations that seem as though Romeo is enjoying being depressed. I mentioned my “odd reading” of the play as a parody to a former Globe actor and he responded as though that were just patently obvious.
    TL;DR — good English teachers not constrained by a system want to teach people how to get more out of literature, not what it means. Good English teachers know there literally can’t be a single true meaning to a text. The reader’s involved. (That’s reader-response and phenomenological criticism in a nutshell, actually)

26. I personally believe that Gatsby is a snapshot of a very specific time in American history, about a very specific type of person and people.
    At least, that's what I remember thinking when we read it mumblecough years ago.

27. Oh, I know. I was being cheeky.

28. Just to be clear: I was being cheeky, not a snarky jerk. 🙂

29. There’s really not much to like about Great Expectations, or anything Dickens wrote really. GAG. I’m not sure he even liked writing, so much as paying the bills.
    1984 scared the living daylights out of me, and definitely made me more paranoid about the government and civil rights. (The movie version, on the other hand, just plain depressed me.)
    Colleen

30. I definitely read Romeo & Juliet as making fun of love and the ideals of soulmates, etc. It is really so much more entertaining that way, and makes so much more sense.

31. No no! I never thought YOU were being a dick!
    Just saying I hate R&J. I think the reason they teach it to 14-year-olds is that they will actually get the love story line that makes me vomit. As a married man (who has presumably experienced mature love), I’d think you, too, would scoff at the shallow portrayal of love in this masterpiece.
    I much prefer the dark plotline of Macbeth.

32. Same here. I mean, I love reading books. It’s like the best thing for me, but I hate reading books for my classes. This whole analysis of a text takes away the whole enjoyment. Reading is about enjoying the the thing you read and finding a meaning that works well with you.
    I’m not surprised that students don’t read books. It’s pointless. Even if you read the book, the teacher would still prove that you didn’t. Just because you didn’t find a symbol or an ideology behind it that was created by literary critics 400 years ago.
    I’m 100% sure that authors themselves,in most cases, don’t think of symbolism or literary theories that some people say they do.

33. (if this is a repost, my apologies)
    First up, a confession. I AM a high school English teacher. No hard feelings. 🙂
    Here’s what I see happening here. Your adult self is responding to what I think is the really good stuff- Romeo & Juliet, 1984 and Brave New World… those are awesome and classic for a reason. (And though many may argue with me that GrEx is a classic, I too, hate it with a burning white-hot hate… Pip is a whiny douche IMO). As far as A Separate Peace… I’d say your teenage self was probably spot on. Gene is not the kind of guy I’d want as a friend.
    Anyway, as a teacher, I think it’s my responsibility to at least expose students to the good stuff. In the 80s (and now) a lot of the stuff geared towards teens was crap, so you’re faced with a choice: do you go with the stuff you know is crap, or do you go with the stuff you know is good and hope that some kids will get it, and some will get it someday? I go with the good stuff when I can. Remember, too, that oftentimes teachers have very little say so in what they actually get to teach. It’s a long, boring story that I won’t go into at this point. Suffice it to say that canon, colleges, standardized tests, and sadly, tradition, often limit the choices teachers have when selecting texts for class.
    It’s hit or miss a lot of the time, though I do think that most of my kids, even if they don’t LIKE what we read, they can at least appreciate why we read it. Sometimes kids just aren’t ready for some things. There’s a vast difference in maturity levels in your average 14-16 year old. For that reason, teachers often can’t teach some of the really good stuff because its about sex, drugs, morality… stuff that is a big no-no for a lot of public schools. For instance, when I teach R&J I can only explain just so much of what the characters are talking about. If I explained everything that Mercutio says I’d be out of a job. Seriously. Nearly every single thing he says is dirrrty. If I explain that the medlar represents a vagina (oops sorry MI legislators) and a poprin’ pear is a penis… yeah. Not going to happen. However, I can tell the students that he’s talking in double entendres (after I explain what those are)and let them mull it over; it’s fun to watch them as the lightbulbs go on over their heads.
    The other thing is, as an adult, you have a lot more life experiences and reference points, which make reading the good stuff even more enjoyable. It’s hard to relate to Jay Gatsby spending his entire life in pursuit of the woman of his dreams when you haven’t even fallen in “like” yet, let alone obsessive love.
    Anyway, that’s a long response, but I appreciate the chance to talk about literature at any time!

34. My high school English teacher threw out the assigned curriculum and we read James Thurber instead. It was awesome.

35. Sometimes a woman eating a banana just means she was hungry. 😀

36. I read Brave New World, Catch 22, and 1984 in 7th grade, because they were listed as the inspiration for Paranoia 1st Edition and I wanted to get a better feel for the game.
    Never quite got Paranoia… I’ve never been good at playing an RPG against the other players like it encourages, but I came away loving those books.
    I then had to read them several years later for class… and I hated them.

37. My take on the world of literature is that just because society deems a book a “classic” doesn’t mean that everyone under the sun is going to adore and shout praises about it from the rooftops (I, for one, cannot see what the appeal is to “Gone with the Wind” or “The Scarlet Letter”). Now I love books. I am the girl who would get a hold of the class reading schedule that summer and would have all the books read by the time class started in the fall. I fell in love with “To Kill a Mockingbird” but imagine my surprise when class comes around and the teacher went on and on about how Boo was an analogy for Christ and Scout was the disciples all rolled into one. In my teacher’s opinion, any real book worth reading was really about something else entirely and you couldn’t consider yourself intelligent if you accepted a book for just what it did to you on an emotional (or, as he viewed it, an entertainment)level. I walked away from that class feeling so stupid for not having seen what my teacher was telling me everyone else could. I re-read it time and again but could not see the analogies that had been presented to me, which bothered me. I loved the book, and it definitely resounded in me, but I was apparently not smart enough to get more out of it. I just couldn’t imagine Harper Lee sitting there with pen in hand and thinking “I want to write about Christ” and then working out the ways to contort her characters to fit the mold. It wasn’t until later that I came to the realization that maybe my instructor saw symbolism because he went looking for it, but that didn’t make my enjoyment and appreciation of the text any less valid. While I do see some “deeper meaning” sometimes in books, I no longer hold to the thinking that every good book out there is some sort of morality lesson to be drummed into my head. I still adore a lot of the so-called classics – “Fahrenheit 451”, “The Great Gatsby”, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (I have a serious crush for alliterative style) and even “Beowulf” but that doesn’t mean that just any old classic will do… it has to be something that engages me and pulls me in, which I think is better than symbolism any old day.

38. I think the way I read helped me stay interested in books in high school, and perhaps I had teachers who also wanted us to think about what we read, instead of just parroting out facts. It’s hard to say, it’s been a while.
    I’ve always been known to devour books so when we had class reading, I’d usually have the book done in a day or two, then I could draw on my memories of the book to process what the teacher was trying to show us about symbolism or whatever. It meant my first experience with the book was one of “Oh, this is a good story” followed up with “Now it’s time to think critically about the book.”
    That being said, I read Moby Dick in 9th grade because I wanted to and I still cannot bring myself to pick it up again. I’ve tried to read other things by Melville but his writing style is not for me. Oliver Twist, which I also read in 9th grade, is getting better the older I get though. I enjoyed it then and I enjoyed it more now that I understand the language a little better.

39. How could anyone use All Quiet on the Western Front as a way to glorify Reagan? It’s a pretty anti-war novel. I just read it at age 28 and thought it was great.

40. For Billy Collins’ take on how the symbolism mentality ruins the reading of poetry, check this out:
    http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/001.html

41. This post made me think of several things-
    1) In high school, I read “A Tale of Two Cities” and hated it. In my first year of college, I found myself in a bit of trouble: in a lit class I never attended I was supposed to have read “Great Expectations” for a test *the next morning*. Read it straight through in 12 hours. My experience with it was somewhat different than yours- I loved it; my high school English teacher never really covered how wickedly funny and righteously pissed off Dickens was. I’m pretty sure the reason I got into it in college was that I never went to my lit class, and missed all the lectures where the prof told everyone what it meant.
    2) I wish teachers would stop assigning Shakespeare to read. They weren’t written to read like novels; they’re plays. They’re written to be seen. Everything most people complain is difficult to understand becomes surprisingly easy when you watch the play.
    3) My teachers and I found a little disagreement on what the “classics” were. This didn’t make my teachers wrong, but it does point out that some classics are better read later in life, when people have some context to them. I have no idea why schools don’t assign more Conrad, London, Stevenson, or even Chandler. It’s just a fact that the attention spans of teenagers it godawful; there’s nothing wrong with assigning books appropriate to that.

42. Just FYI, I put a link to this on my FB page.

43. One of the things I learned throughout my years as an English major is that everything in art is subjective and you should always look at literature in different ways.

44. My senior year in HS featured an AP English class whose reading list included a number of the books you mentioned. The teacher was excellent, and never forced The One True Answer on anything. My freshman year in college, I took a Study of Fiction class that covered many of the same books and short stories. THAT instructor was very big on The One True Answer, and every single one of them, without exception, had some deeply disturbing sexual imagery. I ran into my HS teacher after that class, and mentioned the college instructor’s slant. He was very gracious about it, and said that the sexual slant was one interpretation. My interpretation was that the college instructor was a seriously dirty old man with latent mother issues. Seriously, sometimes a cigar is JUST a cigar!

45. Gods I hated Great Expectations. Never read anything else by Dickens and I probably never will because that book was so singularly awful.

46. Oddly enough, I had read Romeo and Juliet prior to having it forced on me in high school (yes, I tended to read a bit beyond my means…but I had stayed up to watch the old ’68 version on the late show and had to read it) and loved it. I was so thrilled to have it come up in school because it was a work I was familiar with…and the dry, boring presentation almost killed my love of it.
    I have only revisited a few of the books we were forced to read in high school…I keep intending to revisit them and see if being an adult makes a difference. Although I tend to think it’s not so much being an adult as being free to read it and just enjoy rather than examine it for whatever lessons are supposed to be learned.

47. Romeo and Juliet – can’t say I ever hated it, but it’s certainly not my favourite of Shakespeare’s works. Now, Hamlet. God, I have always loved Hamlet… and ‘Much Ado About Nothing’. My two favourites. With Hamlet, I got to go through it twice in eleventh grade because I had the same instructor for English Lit AND English. It was at this time that I also read ‘Beowulf’ and years later, willingly bought my own copy of the Seamus Heaney translation and ate through ‘The First Man in Rome’ by Colleen McCullough by choice for my senior novel project.
    As for other things I read in high school, I thoroughly disliked ‘Lord of the Flies’, but absolutely loved ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ – in this case, all the other kids in that particular English class were the opposite. It was also this same teacher that introduced me to Margaret Atwood with ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’.
    Also, A Clash of Kings, Wil? I’m on ‘A Storm of Swords’ right now. 🙂

48. The only book I finished in high school was Pride and Prejudice, and that was two weeks after the final test for it had already happened. It was something about the concept of “I am being forced to read this” that made me instantly want to do anything else. I never got into reading until college when I recognized role models in Hermione Granger and Rori Gilmore. Now I’m a librarian. 🙂

49. Here here about Shakespeare. Always hated reading Shakespeare mostly because I couldn’t understand it. Was pleasantly surprised to see that Hamlet and so many of the other plays were actually hilariously enjoyable once I discovered a Shakespeare in the park group in my hometown.

50. I think I didn’t really understand a lot of it until I saw an episode of Borgia* I finally understood the whole Capulet and Montague thing, as a kid, the idea of feuds where families killed each other did not really make much sense.
    *(not The Borgias, but the European show which had even more nudity and violence but was just horrible)

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