Signs and Symbols

“She wore cheap black dresses. Unlike other women of her age (such as Mrs. Sol, their next-door neighbor, whose face was all pink and mauve with paint and whose hat was a cluster of brookside flowers), she presented a naked white countenance to the faultfinding light of spring.”

The direct comparison between the mother and her next-door neighbor thematically develops the family’s Alienation and Loneliness, presenting a stark contrast between their lives and the Americans around them. The mother’s drab, colorless appearance outwardly marks her poverty, while also hinting at the inner sadness caused by her life’s troubles and her son’s condition. The personified “faultfinding light of spring,” emphasizes the mother’s feeling of oppression by making the world appear judgmental and harsh.

“A few feet away, under a swaying and dripping tree, a tiny unfledged bird was helplessly twitching in a puddle.”

The image of the twitching bird underlines the mother and father’s feelings of helplessness, occurring just after they have failed to deliver their son’s gift to him in the “sanitarium” (Paragraph 3). The focus on the bird’s “unfledged” state—its inability to fly—connects it to the son, whom a fellow-patient thinks is “learning to fly,” but who has been unable to escape the hospital through suicide. The tiny bird’s vulnerability suggests that it is close to death but not yet there, developing the story’s theme of Death, Life, and In Between by having the bird reside somewhere in the liminal space between life and death.

“The last time the boy had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor’s words, a masterpiece of inventiveness; he would have succeeded had not an envious fellow-patient thought he was learning to fly and stopped him just in time. What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.”

The doctor’s hyperbolic description of the son’s suicide attempt as a “masterpiece of inventiveness” suggests that his interest in the son is purely academic. His callousness toward the son’s fate adds to the Alienation and Loneliness the family feels, suggesting that no one really wants to help them. Separately, describing the fellow-patient as “envious” hints that others share in the son’s delusion and also wish to escape the world, opening the possibility that the son’s perspective is less uncommon than it might at first appear.

“Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.”

This succinct summary of the son’s psychiatric condition, called Referential mania, provides subtle meta-commentary on the fictionality of “Signs and Symbols.” While the son believes everything is a cipher, Nabokov embeds signs and symbols everywhere within the story, suggesting hidden meanings. This process reflects the son’s self-obsession, pointing more toward the person doing the analysis than the text itself.

“The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up, in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being.”

This passage breaks from the rest of the story’s largely straightforward and literal style, instead veering into highly metaphorical and imagery-laden descriptions of the son’s delusions. By doing so, it emphasizes how far the son has moved from reality. However, the son’s poetic view of the world seems beautiful and possibly even desirable compared to the harsh and oppressive description of the mother and father’s reality elsewhere in the story: the rain and poverty and isolation. The poetic nature of the lines describing the son’s perspective emphasizes his method of escaping the world’s problems, developing the story’s exploration of different Responses to Suffering.

“She turned the pages of the book: Minsk, the Revolution, Leipzig, Berlin, Leipzig again, a slanting house front, badly out of focus.”

This catalogue of the family’s long history of exile emphasizes their status as isolated refugees in America. The passage’s restraint when recounting the violent history of the Russian Revolution and Nazi regime in Germany echoes the mother’s wish to forget the horrors of her past. Likewise, the fact that the photo is “badly out of focus” hints at the mother’s wish to smooth over memories she would rather forget. The slanting house front is yet another reminder of the family’s poverty.

“Here was Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, and cancerous growths until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.”

This passage uses irony to highlight the harshness of the world and explore the theme of different Responses to Suffering. All of Aunt Rosa’s worries and anxiety were useless, the passage suggests since they did nothing to prevent her and her family’s deaths during the Holocaust. The futility of her response to life’s troubles suggests that Rosa would have been better served appreciating what she had while she could. The passage’s matter-of-fact tone indicates that the suffering it describes is unavoidable; that what matters is instead how people react to the hostile world in which they live.

“The boy, aged six—that was when he drew wonderful birds with human hands and feet, and suffered from insomnia like a grown-up man.”

The son’s childhood drawings reinforce his connection to the “twitching bird” that the parent’s pass outside of the hospital, as well as his earlier suicide attempt in which he was “learning to fly.” In this way, the story subtly positions the son as an innocent caged creature just trying to break free. The young age when he made these drawings and developed insomnia suggests that he may always have been predisposed to his psychiatric condition. Despite the indications of his growing mental health condition, the mother remembers her son’s drawings as “wonderful,” making clear her sincere love for him.

“She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the in visible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer.”

The mother’s thoughts after looking at the old photographs suggest she has had an epiphany about the world and her family. Pain, she realizes, is a natural part of the world, but so is tenderness and beauty. Faced with a childhood of pain, her son’s tenderness and innocence have been transformed into a psychiatric condition, while her husband has been crushed down by the weight of poverty and old age. While their Responses to Suffering have led to separate bitter ends, the mother gains a measure of control by looking at the world’s harsh realities with clear eyes, letting both life’s beauty and pain wash over her, without letting them bring her down.

“‘I can’t sleep because I am dying,’ he said, and lay down on the couch.”

The father’s hyperbolic statement develops the theme of Death, Life, and In Between by highlighting his feeling that death is slowly creeping into his life. Like his suicidal son, the father’s ill health and advanced age have put him on the threshold of death, without quite crossing over to the other side. By having the father lay down on the couch, the story indicates that his realization about the nearness of death is potentially overwhelming and difficult to bear. It is as if he is giving up.

“‘We must get him out of there quick. Otherwise, we’ll be responsible...Responsible!’ He hurled himself into a sitting position, both feet on the floor, thumping his forehead with his clenched fist.”

Rejecting the melancholy he has demonstrated during the story thus far, the father here finds his own path forward by focusing on what matters most to him: his family. His plan to get his son out of the psychiatric hospital develops the theme of Responses to Suffering by showing the father’s sudden improvement once he reaches this decision. Before, he was laying passively on the couch, but now he is reinvigorated, hurling himself into action, feet on the floor and ready to face the future with his family restored. His physical transformation and confident repetition of “Responsible!” underline his renewed optimism that there are some things in his challenging life that are still under his control.

“Bending with difficulty, she retrieved some playing cards and a photograph or two that had slipped to the floor—the knave of hearts, the nine of spades, the ace of spades, the maid Elsa and her bestial beau.”

The playing cards are one of many examples of the story toying with the reader’s experience deciphering the maze of potential signs and symbols that make up “Signs and Symbols.” By highlighting the specific cards—knave of hearts, nine of spades, ace of spades—the story invites the reader to seek for a deeper meaning. Perhaps, for example, the knave represents the son, while the nine and ace of spades provide ominous indicators regarding the son’s fate. Read this way, the cards would hint that the final telephone call reports the son’s death. Read another way, however, the cards are just another trick to seduce the reader into sharing the son’s Referential mania, in which he mistakenly believes everything is a puzzle that he alone can solve.

“It does not matter what the Prince says. He won’t have much to say anyway, because it will come out cheaper.”

The father’s reference to his brother Isaac reinforces his constant worry over the family’s financial situation and his frustration with his inability to earn enough money to support his wife and son. The father’s suggestion that Isaac only cares how much things cost, rather than about the well-being of his nephew, hints that American living may somehow have corrupted Isaac, making him callous to the needs of his family. The father’s resentful tone toward Isaac highlights the theme of Alienation and Loneliness by showing how the father is estranged from even his own brother.