What Is Symbolism in a Story?
Quick answer: Symbolism in a story is the use of concrete objects, actions or images to carry meaning beyond themselves. How symbols work, classic examples, and craft rules.
Symbolism is the use of something concrete, an object, action, place or image, to carry meaning beyond its literal self. The wallpaper in a sickroom becomes the trap of a marriage; a caged bird becomes a woman's position in her household; a road not taken becomes every choice a life forecloses. The literal thing stays fully itself, and that is the trick: a symbol is not a code to be swapped out but a thing that means twice.
Fiction leans on symbolism because readers feel concrete things more than they feel abstractions. Freedom is an argument; an open gate with a dog refusing to walk through it is an experience.
How symbols actually work on a reader
A symbol earns its second meaning through placement and pressure, not decree. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) makes ugly wallpaper mean confinement by locking a woman in the room with it and letting her stare; by the end, the pattern she strips from the wall is her own imposed life. Nothing in the story says the wallpaper represents anything. The situation does the meaning-making.
This is why the strongest symbols work even for readers who never consciously notice them. The literal layer must be complete: a fully believable wallpaper, sea, or pair of spectacles. If the object exists only to mean something, readers smell the cardboard, and the symbol collapses into allegory's cruder cousin, the prop with a label.
Classic cases worth studying
Kate Chopin uses the caged parrot that opens The Awakening (1899) with surgical economy: a bird that speaks a little Spanish and a language nobody understands, hanging outside the door of a wife whose interior nobody bothers to learn. Nathaniel Hawthorne built The Scarlet Letter (1850) around a symbol the characters themselves fight over: the embroidered A whose official meaning, adulteress, Hester slowly forces the town to re-read as able.
That second case shows something craft manuals underplay: symbols can be contested inside the story, their meaning a live argument among the characters rather than a fixed equation. And Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea demonstrates restraint in the other direction; asked what the story's objects symbolised, Hemingway insisted the sea was the sea and the fish a fish, knowing the depths readers found were built into the situation, not stapled onto the props.
Using symbolism without embarrassing yourself
The reliable method is archaeological rather than architectural: draft the story literal-mindedly, then reread and find the objects that already glow, the thing a character cannot stop touching, the weather that kept arriving at emotional turns. Promote one or two of these by giving them better placement: first appearance early, one return under pressure, one appearance near the end, changed.
Choose objects with natural resonance for this story rather than universal dictionary meanings; a dove means peace everywhere, which is exactly why it means nothing in particular in your story. A dented thermos that belonged to a dead father means something nowhere else and everything here. Private, situation-grown symbols outperform public ones almost every time.
Common mistakes and misconceptions
The classic failure is the imported symbol: an object carried into the story because a guidebook says it means rebirth, connected to nothing the characters do. Its sibling is the explained symbol, where narration decodes the image, the broken clock, like their marriage, had stopped, which turns resonance into homework. Third is symbol overgrowth: every noun freighted with significance until the story reads like a customs inspection.
The misconception that harms readers as much as writers is that symbolism is a hidden-object puzzle planted by authors and dug up in classrooms. In good fiction, symbols are mostly emergent: chosen half-consciously, sharpened in revision, completed by the reader. If you write real things under real pressure, symbolism will largely happen; your job is to notice it and get out of its way.
What poets can take from this
- Draft literal first; promote symbols in revision from what is already there.
- Keep one or two symbols per short story and let the rest of the world stay plain.
- Never explain a symbol in narration; deletion is the fix.
- Ground every symbolic object in physical, practical detail first.
- Prefer objects with private, situational meaning over universal emblems.
Try it yourself
Give a character an ordinary object they refuse to throw away: a bus ticket, a chipped cup, a key to a former flat. Write a 600-word story in which the object appears three times and is never once described as meaning anything.
Questions
What is the difference between symbolism and metaphor?
A metaphor is a statement in language: her voice was gravel. A symbol is a thing inside the story's world that carries extra meaning: the gravel road she leaves by. Metaphors live in sentences; symbols live in the plot and can recur.
What is the difference between symbolism and allegory?
Scale and system. A symbol is local, one object meaning twice, while an allegory maps a whole narrative onto a second meaning point by point. A story can hold many independent symbols; an allegory conscripts everything into one scheme.
Do authors intend all the symbolism readers find?
No, and most working writers admit it cheerfully. Much symbolism emerges from the subconscious during drafting and is sharpened, or simply permitted, in revision. A symbol a reader can support from the text is real, whatever the author planned.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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