Symbolism Essay Examples

Troy brings his illegitimate baby, Raynell home for the first time at the beginning of the Act Two, Scene Three. Troy sits with his motherless baby on a porch where he once was wanted, but now sitting where he is not wanted. Then, Troy starts singing, “Please Mr. Engineer, let a man ride the line….

Symbolism and other figurative speech in The Birth-mark and The Thing in the Forest Birth – Mark : First and fore-most the birthmark represents the fatal flaw of humanity, and that eventually we all fall into sin, sorrow, decay, and death. I think that the birthmark represents the desire for perfection or in this case…

Moby Dick is Melville’s masterpiece, but it is overlooked in its author’s time. The revival interest in Moby Dick in the 1920s is of the most dramatic reversals in all literary history. From a by-line in the textbooks, Melville becomes, overnight, one of the half-dozen major American literary figures of the 19th century. Some critics…

Chinua Achebe wrote the book, Things Fall Apart, to fight against the stereotypical image of African people lacking in culture, which is what had been assumed by many people. He accomplished his goal in many different ways throughout the book, using a variety of linguistic devices. However, the device that stood out to throughout the…

Amir’s quest to redeem himself makes up the heart of the novel. Early on, Amir strives to redeem himself in Baba’s eyes, primarily because his mother died giving birth to him, and he feels responsible. To redeem himself to Baba, Amir thinks he must win the kite-tournament and bring Baba the losing kite, both of…

In the short story, Poe uses the pit to symbolize hell. In the beginning, the soldier describes going into the pit as “a mad rushing descent as of the soul into Hades” (Poe 268). The descent reminds the reader of hell in that it is beneath the surface of the ground. Also, when the soldier…

Symbolisms And Imagery In The Story of An HourIn one of the saddest tales of married life ever to be written, Kate Chopin shows us that the struggle for a woman’s identity within a marriage has been a centuries old fought battle. Within her short fictional tale is the story of a one woman’s struggle…

In the play The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams uses many symbols which represent the lives of the characters and the lives of his family. Many of the symbols used in the play symbolize escape and illusion. This essay will individualise and analyse the symbols, and will try to connect them with other symbols. Many of…

When you read the star by Alasdair Gray for the first time, you think it’s a simple story about a young boy who finds a star, while in fact the symbolism behind this story is far far away from that. Indeed the characters, the setting & even the star itself have very deep meanings. Cameron…

Greasy Lake by T. C. Boyle is about three teen boys considering their selves to be “dangerous characters”, realizing, after a catastrophic chain of events, that they may not want to be quite as bad as they think. The boys go out looking for adventure and end up running into trouble when they get to…