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1、personify the vanishing aristocracy of the South, still maintaining a black servant and being ruthless betrayed by a moneymaking Yankee. Sometimes a part of a characters body or an attribute may convey symbolic meaning, for example, a baleful eye in Edgar Allan Poes “The Tell-Tale Heart.” 4. Symbol
2、used in works of fiction is the symbolic act Another kind of symbol commonly employed in works of fiction is the symbolic act: an act or a gesture with larger significance than its literal meaning. Captain Ahab in Melvilles Moby-Dick deliberately snaps his tobacco pipe and throws it away before sett
3、ing out in pursuit of the huge whale, a gesture suggesting that he is determined to take his revenge and will let nothing to distract him from it. Another typical symbolic act is the burning of the barn by the boys father in Faulkners “Barn Burning”: it is an act of no mere destroying a barn, but an
4、 expression of his profound spite and hatred towards that class of people who have driven his family out of his land. His hatred extends to anything he does not possess himself and, beyond that, burning a barn reflects the fathers memories of the “waste and extravagance of war” and the “element of f
5、ire spoke to some deep mainspring” in his being. 5. A symbol is a trope In a broad literary sense, a symbol is a trope that combines a literal and sensuous quality with an necessary or suggestive aspect. However, in literary criticism it is necessary to distinguish symbol from image, metaphor, and,
6、especially, allegory. An image An image is a literal and concrete representation of a sensory experience or of an object that can be known by one or more of the senses. It is the means by which experience in its richness and emotional complexity is communicated. (Holman and Harmon, A Handbook to Lit
7、erature, 1986) Images may be literal or figurative, a literal image being one that involves no necessary change or extension in the obvious meaning of the words. Prose works are usually full of this kind of image. For example, novels and stories by Conard and Hemingway are noted for the evocative po
8、wer of their literal images. A figurative image is one that involves a “turn” on the literary meaning of the words. For example, in the lines “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free; /The holy time is quiet as a nun,” the second line is highly figurative while the first line evokes a literal image
9、. We consider an image, whether literal or figurative, to have a concrete referent in the objective world and to function as image when it powerfully evokes that referent; whereas a symbol functions like an image but differs from it in going beyond the evocation of the objective referent by making t
10、hat referent suggest to the reader a meaning beyond itself. In other words, a sysmbol is an image that evokes an objective, concrete reality, but then that reality suggests another level of meaning directly; it evokes an object that suggests the meaning, with the emphasis being laid on the latter pa
11、rt. As Coleridge said, “It partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible. Metaphor A metaphor is an implied analogy imaginatively identifying one object with another and ascribing to the first object one or more of the qualities of the second, or investing the first with emotional or imagina
12、tive qualities associated with the second. It is not an uncommon literacy device in fiction, though it is more commonly used in poetry while simile is more commonly used in prose. A metaphor emphasizes rich suggestiveness in the differences between the things compared and the recognition of surprisi
13、ng but unsuspected similarities. Cleanth Brooks uses the term “functional metaphor” to describe the way in which the metaphor is able to have “referential” and “emotive” characteristics, and to go beyond those characteristics to become a direct means in itself of representing a truth incommunicable
14、by other means. When a metaphor performs this function, it is behaving as a symbol. But a symbol differs from a metaphor in that a metaphor evokes an object in order to illustrate an idea or demonstrate a quality, whereas a symbol embodies the idea or the quality. Allegory An allegory is a story in
15、which persons, places, actions, and things are equated with meanings that lie outside of the story itself. Thus it represents one thing in the guise of anotheran abstraction in the form of a concrete image. A clear example is the old Arab fable of the frog and scorpion, who me one day on the bank of
16、 the Nile, which they both wanted to cross. The frog offered to ferry the scorpion over on his back, provided the scorpion promised not to sting him. The scorpion agreed so long as the frog would promise not to drown him. The mutual promise exchanged, they crossed the river. On the far bank the scorpion stung the frog mortally. “Why did you do that?” croaked the frog, as he lay dying. “Why?” replied the scorpion. “Were both Arabs, arent we?” If we substitute for the fro
