Symbolism Journal

Symbolism is a very powerful literary tool. Every single author who has written a story has in one way another included symbolism in their writing. It could be as basic a symbol as a lion representing courage, or in the case of Hemingway using several Christian themes and incidents to symbolize the events in his novel The Old Man and the Sea. I'm usually a fan of symbolism in most cases because authors can usually convey it in a clever and very original way. Most symbolism it seems to me is very original but after a while some religious symbolism can be overdone and cliched. For example when I was reading and analyzing Grapes of Wrath I was pretty sick of symbolism at that point and when I found something that to me looked like symbolism for something else, I simply found it old and uninteresting sometimes even annoying. That's a very bad quality to have however because most symbolism is veiled thinly and used so brilliantly in a novel to further help it's point across. Symbolism is not a thing to strain and agonize over analyzing, but something to enhance and enrich the journey of reading the book. In the case of a novel like Fahrenheit 451 the symbolism is so brilliantly crafted in the novel that some won't even recognize it until afterward reading of Bradbury's viewpoints on censorship and the media. Symbolism enriches novel's in many ways often adding more qualities to the protagonist or antagonist or relating the plot to well known events in history. It is a great and necessary tool that all authors must master to become successful.