What Do The Signs And Symbols In Nabokov'S Story Represent?

2025-10-27 21:03:53 200

6 回答

Tabitha
Tabitha
2025-10-28 02:59:02
Peeling back 'Signs and Symbols' I find Nabokov playing a mischievous game with meaning itself. I approach the story like someone untangling a necklace: each bead—an ordinary object, a phone call, a color, a list—glints faintly with possible significance, but Nabokov refuses a single, comforting interpretation. The son’s condition—known as referential mania in the story—turns the whole world into a field of signs for him; that concept is simultaneously a literal plot engine and a metaphor for how readers (and artists) project meanings onto the mundane.

On a stylistic level I’m drawn to how Nabokov contrasts clinical description with lyrical detail. He catalogues items and actions almost scientifically, then lets sensory moments—the shimmer of light, a particular candy, the ring of a telephone—explode into emotional weight. Those little motifs, repeated and varied, act like musical leitmotifs: they don’t point to a single moral but accumulate mood and ambiguity. Sometimes a phone ring is just a phone ring; sometimes it’s a summons, a prank, or a sign of catastrophe. That oscillation is intentional and brilliantly cruel.

Ultimately the symbols in the story map the gap between internal suffering and external world. They make me think about how fiction can mimic mental states: not by explaining them, but by making us experience the slippage between sign and referent. I walk away unsettled but thrilled by how Nabokov trusts ambiguity to carry meaning—it's a brilliant, stubborn way to write that lingers with me.
Quinn
Quinn
2025-10-28 19:47:22
I tend to treat Nabokov like a gem-cutter: 'Signs and Symbols' is full of tiny, precisely angled facets that throw off different reflections depending on how you turn them. To me the most haunting symbolic move is the collapse of sign and world—the son’s conviction that random events reference him turns the mundane into a threatening text. Nabokov then flips that idea so the reader becomes complicit, scanning ordinary details for hidden meanings and finding only ambiguity.

I’m drawn to the story’s formal play, too: lists that feel like inventories of a mind, numbers and calls that might be chance or menace, and sensory shards that carry outsized emotion. Those motifs aren’t metaphors with one solution; they’re tools to make you feel how fragile interpretation is. I always finish the story with a kind of cold admiration—Nabokov can make uncertainty feel like art, and that paradox is thrilling to me.
Amelia
Amelia
2025-10-31 21:03:35
To my taste, the signs in 'Signs and Symbols' work both like clues in a mystery and like smudges on a window: they invite interpretation and block it at the same time. The son's confinement and the clinical language surrounding him function as symbols of modern medical and administrative reduction — people becoming case files — while household objects ground the story in tender, domestic grief. Nabokov deliberately withholds a final key; the famous telephone announcement at the end is ambiguous enough that it can be read as an objective intrusion or as the narrator’s hallucinated confirmation of doom. I find that the story’s power comes from this tension between symbolic richness and ironic anti-symbolism: Nabokov gives you signs but also reminds you that meaning is partly a projection. Ultimately, for me the symbols circle back to the parents’ care and the quiet cruelty of trying to name what is essentially unnameable — and that conclusion stays with me every time I close the book.
Wesley
Wesley
2025-11-01 09:50:18
The colors and tiny details in 'Signs and Symbols' always snag my attention first. I catch myself dwelling on the way ordinary things—a piece of clothing, a description of a room, the steady pattern of numbers—turn into emotionally charged signals. For the son, everything is a message aimed at him; for the parents, those same objects are painfully neutral. That contrast becomes the heart of the story’s symbolism: meaning is not fixed, it’s made and misread in the mind.

I also like how Nabokov toys with literary signs versus lived signs. He sprinkles almost parodic examples of symbols from other writers, but he never lets the story settle into neat allegory. The telephone at the end, the recurrence of particular sounds and colors, and the clinical label of referential mania all push in different directions. They make the narrative at once intimate and distant, because we can’t fully inhabit the son's perception but we can feel the parents’ helplessness. It’s a story that resists tidy decoding, and that resistance, for me, is what makes its symbols so powerful.
Imogen
Imogen
2025-11-02 04:43:55
Bright, brittle, and packed with the kind of restraint that makes you look twice — 'Signs and Symbols' feels like a small machine that keeps clicking long after you stop watching it. I read it as a study in how ordinary objects and bureaucratic language can stand in for something unbearably private: the son's illness, the parents' helplessness, and the way meaning gets piled onto things until they buckle. The telephone announcement at the end — that strange catalogue of 'hopeless cases' — works both as a literal interruption and as a metaphor for the moment when reality collapses into clinical labels. To me, that line is less a plot twist and more a moral punch: the human gets translated into a file number.

Nabokov loves to tease readers who are hunting for allegory, though; the title itself is deliciously provocative. He sets little domestic items — a jar, a box of sweets, a photograph — against an economy of numbers and lists, and the clash shows how symbols can be abused. There’s also the recurring motif of vision and windows: sight, mis-seeing, and the way the family peers at the world through fragile glass. The son's diagnosis, often summarized as 'referential mania' in criticism, becomes a meta-commentary: meanings cling to the world like burrs, and the act of interpretation can feel like one more illness.

So the signs in the story do several jobs at once: they map grief, they mock allegory, and they dramatize the limits of language. I keep coming back because each reading rearranges which small object feels the loudest — and Nabokov delights in that shifting orchestra, which still gives me chills.
Marissa
Marissa
2025-11-02 17:05:26
I always come away convinced that the symbols in 'Signs and Symbols' are deliberately double-edged — they point and they mislead at the same time. On one level, those small, domestic details (pill bottles, boxes of candy, a cold apartment) act as emotional shorthand: they tell you about the parents’ fragile routine and the tiny rituals that punctuate ordinary sorrow. Nabokov piles up clinical phrases and catalogues of cases to show how modern life can flatten particular human suffering into diagnostic categories. That bureaucratic language is itself a kind of symbol: it stands for a world that wants tidy explanations where there are none.

At the same time, the story is a commentary on interpretation. Nabokov seems to wink at readers who rush to allegorize: he gives you enough 'signs' to build a theory but then undercuts the certainty of any single reading. The ambiguous phone call is a perfect example — is it an external fact or the narrator’s collapse into dread? The answer resists closure, which is why the story stays alive. For me, the most affecting symbol remains the parents’ love — small, practical, and stubborn — which anchors the narrative and keeps it humane amid textual games. That little humanity lingers long after the puzzles are shelved.
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