29 pages • 58 minutes read
Vladimir NabokovSigns and Symbols
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1948A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Ambiguous Ending
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains outdated references to psychiatric conditions, including the concept of “madness.” This section of the guide also discusses suicide and the Holocaust.
“Signs and Symbols” ends abruptly, with the mother and father’s telephone ringing for the third time. The son’s fate remains unresolved, and the parents’ future is unclear. This ambiguous ending invites the reader to engage more closely with the text by speculating on what they believe will happen to the family next, as well as who is on the other end of the phone line.
Given the story’s focus on the son’s psychiatric disability, it is possible that the third call involves him. Or it could instead merely be the unnamed girl mistakenly calling for Charlie a third time. By withholding a clear answer, the story lures the reader into carefully studying the narrative to try to work out what will happen next. It is left to interpretation whether the cards that slip to the floor, or the colors of the jelly jars, secretly hint at who is calling. Either way, by trying to find signs in random details, the reader enters in the son’s Referential mania, seeking hidden meanings that may not exist.
Irony
“Signs and Symbols” uses moments of irony—where the reader or a character’s expectations sharply diverge from what actually happens—to reinforce the harshness of the family’s setting. For example, whereas the mother and father might anticipate comfort and understanding from their son’s medical practitioners, instead the nurse “brightly” (Paragraph 3) explains he has tried to die by suicide, while the doctor views the suicide attempt, not as horrible and concerning, but as a “masterpiece of inventiveness” (Paragraph 6). The disconnect between the medical personnel’s expected behavior and their actual, careless words suggests that no one is looking out for the family’s well-being, emphasizing the story’s theme of Alienation and Loneliness. The mother’s memories of Aunt Rosa, who spent her life fussing about various difficulties, only to be put to death by the Germans, serves a similar function, highlighting the harsh and unforgiving aspects of life.
Repetition
The story uses repetition to emphasize the mother and father’s monotonous lives and inescapable challenges. Right from the beginning, the fact that this is the “fourth time in as many years” (Paragraph 1) that the parents must find a gift for their son indicates that their lives are settled into a predictable pattern of suffering. The repeated listing of the steps on their journey to and from the hospital—the subway train to the bus to the rainy walk, back to the bus, the train, and the walk home—underlines the monotony and joylessness of their lives. The repetition in the story mirrors the “recurrent waves of pain” (Paragraph 11) that the mother and father endure.
The repeated phone calls that conclude the story play with this technique. They seem to build dramatic tension, leading toward some sort of climax and adding to the stakes of the third call. However, the story’s abrupt ending leaves unclear whether this repetition was actually leading somewhere, or if the call was instead just another misdial, which would again demonstrate the unchanging monotony of the family’s life.
Perspective
The story complicates the central conflict of the son’s psychiatric condition by refraining from providing his direct perspective during the course of the narrative. The son never physically appears in the story, and his experience is always framed through the perspective of others, including his parents. Instead of speaking for himself, it is the nurse who describes his most recent attempt to die by suicide, with the “doctor’s words” (Paragraph 6) and “elaborate paper in a scientific monthly” (Paragraph 7) providing context. The mother’s view of her son is mediated though old photographs of his childhood, while the father’s closest connection to his son is through the jelly jars.
These secondary perspectives on the son’s experience add to the story’s ambiguity and once again invite the reader to try to piece together various details to find out what is really happening. Despite those efforts, however, the story ultimately leaves the son’s real perspective unknown.
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