Symbolism in Short Stories
Browse our curated collection of short stories featuring symbolism with literary analysis and discussion guides.
Symbolism: definition and examples in literature
Symbolism is the use of a concrete detail to suggest meaning beyond its literal role. In literature, an object, color, setting, character, or action can carry ideas about a story’s conflicts and themes while remaining part of its fictional world.
A useful example of symbolism connects three things: the symbol, a possible meaning, and evidence in the text. The six cards below follow that pattern using stories in this collection. Categories can overlap. Test these interpretations against the whole story. The examples discuss endings.
Object symbolism: the wallpaper
An ordinary object takes on emotional or social meaning through the attention characters give it.
Example — The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Symbol — the wallpaper’s enclosing pattern. Meaning — it can represent confinement under domestic and medical authority, as well as the narrator’s changing perception. Evidence — “it becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be.” The narrator sees imprisonment in the room where she is supposed to recover.
Color symbolism: scarlet windows
A color gains significance from its associations within the story. Read the surrounding descriptions before assigning it a meaning; colors have no universal translation.
Example — The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe: Symbol — the scarlet panes in the black chamber. Meaning — they can suggest the mortality that Prospero’s celebration attempts to exclude. Evidence — “The panes here were scarlet—a deep blood color.” Poe explicitly connects the color with blood, echoing the disease outside. The setting brings a reminder of death into the protected party.
Setting symbolism: the divided landscape
A place can give physical form to a conflict. Contrasts between parts of a landscape may matter more than the meaning of any isolated tree or hill.
Example — Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway: Symbol — the contrasting sides of the valley. Meaning — the landscape can suggest different possible futures as the couple discusses an operation. Evidence — “Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro.” These living fields contrast with the dry country described earlier. The contrast supports a reading about possibility and loss without proving which decision the woman finally makes.
Character symbolism: Faith
A character’s name or role can suggest an idea while the character still participates in the literal plot.
Example — Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne: Symbol — Brown’s wife, Faith, especially her name. Meaning — she can embody his trust in goodness as well as his attachment to home. Evidence — “And Faith, as the wife was aptly named,” draws attention to the name’s significance. Brown’s fear of losing his wife becomes entangled with religious doubt. This reading describes his experience; it does not establish that his suspicions about her are true.
Action symbolism: keeping the heron’s secret
An action or refusal can express an allegiance beyond its immediate result. Look at what the choice protects, what it costs, and where it occurs in the plot.
Example — A White Heron by Sarah Orne Jewett: Symbol — Sylvia’s silence about the nest. Meaning — her refusal can represent loyalty to wild life over the hunter’s reward and approval. Evidence — “Sylvia cannot speak; she cannot tell the heron's secret and give its life away.” Silence has a concrete consequence: it protects the bird. That consequence grounds the broader reading, while her disappointment at the hunter’s departure keeps the choice from feeling easy.
Animal symbolism: the cat’s marking
An animal or one of its features may carry a character’s fears and moral anxieties. Distinguish what the narrator believes from what the story independently establishes.
Example — The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe: Symbol — the marking on the second cat, which the narrator interprets as a gallows. Meaning — it can suggest punishment and the return of consequences he tries to escape. Evidence — “the image of a hideous—of a ghastly thing—of the Gallows!” His fearful description supports this interpretation without proving that the animal is supernatural. The narrator’s attempt to blame the cat also exposes his evasion of responsibility.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between symbolism and metaphor?
A metaphor describes one thing as another through an implied comparison. Symbolism lets a detail in the fictional world carry further meaning through context. Faith remains a character in Young Goodman Brown while her name suggests belief; the story does not need to turn that connection into a direct metaphor.
What is the difference between a symbol and a motif?
A symbol carries meaning beyond its literal role; a motif is an element that recurs. Repetition can strengthen a symbol, but a motif may instead establish atmosphere or structure. The wallpaper’s recurring pattern can function as both. A symbol can also matter through one decisive appearance rather than frequent repetition.
How do you identify symbolism in a story?
Notice details that receive unusual attention, recur, change, or appear at a turning point. Connect one detail to the character’s conflict, then quote the passage that supports your reading. Check the rest of the story for contradictions. A detail’s presence alone is not enough to establish a symbolic meaning.
Does a symbol always have only one meaning?
No. The wallpaper can suggest social confinement and the narrator’s mental distress at the same time. Multiple interpretations can be persuasive when each accounts for textual details. Openness does not make every claim equally strong: explain the evidence and acknowledge details that complicate your reading.
What are some common examples of symbolism in literature?
Objects, colors, landscapes, characters, and actions can all become symbols. In the stories above, the wallpaper suggests confinement, Faith’s name connects a person with belief, and Sylvia’s silence expresses protection of the heron. These are contextual readings, not rules that every similar object, name, or silence must follow.
What does raven symbolism mean in Poe’s The Raven?
The raven in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven is commonly read as an embodiment of grief and the speaker’s inability to escape the memory of lost love. The Raven is a poem, not a short story, and it is not in this collection. For a Poe story you can read here, follow The Black Cat link in the animal-symbolism example above and examine how the narrator gives an animal a fearful meaning.
Hills Like White Elephants
An American man and a young woman sit at a train station in Spain, drinking and waiting. Through carefully constructed dialogue full of subtext, they discuss an unspecified "operation" - implied to be an abortion. The conversation reveals a power imbalance, emotional disconnect, and an uncertain future for their relationship.
The Story of an Hour
Mrs. Mallard learns of her husband's death in a railroad accident. After initial grief, alone in her room she discovers an unexpected feeling of freedom and independence. She whispers "free, free, free!" and begins to imagine a self-directed future. When her husband unexpectedly walks through the door alive, she collapses and dies - doctors say of "joy that kills."
The Monkey's Paw
Mr. and Mrs. White acquire a magical monkey's paw from Sergeant-Major Morris, who warns them that its wishes come with devastating consequences. Mr. White's wish for two hundred pounds is followed the next day by news that their son Herbert was caught in machinery at work; the firm disclaims responsibility but pays exactly that sum. About a week after the funeral, Mrs. White insists he use the second wish to bring Herbert back. When a knocking begins at the door, Mr. White finds the paw and makes a third and last wish, whose words the story never gives. The knocking stops and the road outside is empty.
To Build a Fire
A newcomer to the Yukon sets out alone on a brutally cold day despite warnings from an experienced old-timer. Accompanied only by a husky dog whose instincts sense the danger the man ignores, he presses forward through seventy-five-below temperatures. When he breaks through hidden ice and soaks his feet, his attempts to build a life-saving fire fail — first smothered by snow from a tree, then lost when his frozen hands drop the last matches. Unable to run to safety, the man succumbs to the cold, while the dog, guided by instinct rather than arrogance, trots on toward camp and warmth.
The Bet
At a party, a wealthy banker and a young lawyer argue over whether capital punishment or life imprisonment is more humane. The banker wagers two million rubles that the lawyer cannot endure fifteen years of solitary confinement. The lawyer accepts and voluntarily imprisons himself in a garden lodge. Over fifteen years he passes through despair, wine, and finally an immense program of reading that transforms him. On the eve of his release the banker, now near ruin, resolves to murder him rather than pay - only to find a letter in which the lawyer renounces the money and everything the world values, then escapes five hours early to forfeit the bet.
The Masque of the Red Death
As a plague called the Red Death ravages his country, Prince Prospero withdraws with a thousand healthy nobles into a sealed abbey to wait out the pestilence in pleasure. Deep into their revels he throws a lavish masquerade through seven strangely colored rooms, the last of them black and blood-red and shunned by the guests. At midnight a masked figure appears in the costume of the Red Death itself. Enraged, Prospero pursues it into the black chamber and falls dead; when the revelers seize the masquer they find the costume empty. One by one they die, and the Red Death claims absolute dominion.
Désirée's Baby
Désirée, a foundling of unknown parentage raised by the Valmondés, marries the proud Louisiana planter Armand Aubigny, who loves her despite her obscure origins. Months after their son is born, Armand grows cold; Désirée realizes with horror that the child's skin reveals mixed race. Armand blames and rejects her, and she walks with the baby into the bayou, never to return. Burning her letters afterward, Armand finds among his own mother's papers a note revealing that it was his mother - not Désirée - who belonged to 'the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery.'
The Yellow Wallpaper
A woman suffering from what her physician husband John calls a 'temporary nervous depression' is confined for a summer to an upstairs room and forbidden to work or write. Denied any outlet, she becomes fixated on the room's sickly yellow wallpaper. In secret journal entries she begins to see a woman trapped and creeping behind the pattern, and gradually identifies with her. By the end she has torn the paper from the walls to 'free' the trapped woman - and, creeping around the locked room, has slipped entirely into madness.
Young Goodman Brown
In Puritan Salem, Goodman Brown leaves his young wife, Faith, at nightfall to keep a mysterious appointment in the forest. There a devilish traveler leads him toward a witches' sabbath, where he is horrified to see the pious figures of his community - his minister, the catechism teacher, and finally Faith herself - gathered to be received into the devil's communion. Whether he dreams it or not, Brown returns to the village a changed man: he can no longer trust in anyone's goodness, and he lives out his days in gloom and suspicion.
The Last Leaf
In Greenwich Village, a young painter named Johnsy lies gravely ill with pneumonia and decides she will die when the last leaf falls from the ivy vine outside her window. Her friend Sue and their gruff old neighbor Behrman, a failed painter forever talking of the masterpiece he will someday paint, try to lift her spirits. Through a night of freezing storm one last leaf clings impossibly to the vine, and Johnsy, shamed by its persistence, resolves to live. Only afterward do they learn that Behrman went out in the storm to paint that leaf on the wall - his masterpiece - and caught the pneumonia that killed him.
The Nightingale and the Rose
A young Student weeps because he cannot find the red rose that would win a dance with the professor's daughter. A Nightingale, believing him to be a true lover, resolves to help. Told that the only way to make a red rose is to sing all night with her breast pressed against a thorn, she gives her life-blood to stain a white rose red. The Student finds the rose, but the girl scorns it in favor of jewels, and he flings it into the gutter, dismisses love as unpractical, and goes back to his books - never knowing what the little bird gave for it.
The Black Cat
A once gentle, animal-loving man descends into alcoholism and cruelty. He mutilates and then hangs his beloved black cat, Pluto; that night his house burns, leaving the image of a hanged cat scorched on a wall. He takes in a second, similar cat whose white patch grows into the shape of a gallows, and his hatred of it deepens. Trying to kill the animal with an axe, he buries the blade in his wife's skull instead and walls her corpse in the cellar. Confident he is safe, he raps on the wall for the visiting police - and a wailing cry answers from within: he has entombed the cat alive with the body, and its voice sends him to the gallows.
Sredni Vashtar
Conradin, a sickly ten-year-old, lives under the joyless authority of his guardian and cousin, Mrs. De Ropp, whom he quietly hates. In a disused shed he keeps two secrets: a hen and a polecat-ferret he has made into a private, vengeful god named Sredni Vashtar, to whom he offers ritual worship. When 'the Woman' notices his visits and goes to the shed to clear it out, Conradin watches from the house and prays his terrible prayer. She does not come back; at last the ferret emerges with dark stains at its jaws and throat. As the household discovers her mauled body, Conradin calmly makes himself another piece of toast.
The Cop and the Anthem
With winter closing in, Soapy, a homeless man in New York, hatches his annual plan: to get himself arrested so he can spend three warm, fed months in the Blackwell's Island jail. He tries again and again to be caught - dining without paying, smashing a shop window, harassing a woman, stealing an umbrella, disturbing the peace - but every scheme comically fails to interest the police. Defeated, he pauses outside a church where an organ anthem stirs a sudden resolve to reform his life and find honest work. At that very moment a policeman arrests him for loitering, and the magistrate sentences him to exactly the three months on the Island he had wanted all along.
A Piece of String
On market-day in a Norman town, the thrifty peasant Maitre Hauchecorne stoops to pick up a bit of string from the road - and, spotting his enemy the harness-maker Malandain watching, hides it out of embarrassment. When a lost wallet is announced, Malandain reports that he saw Hauchecorne pick something up, and the old man is accused of the theft. Though the wallet is soon found and returned by someone else, no one will believe Hauchecorne's story: they decide he had an accomplice. He wastes away obsessively repeating his innocence to anyone who will listen, and dies still protesting, his last words about a little piece of string.
The Interlopers
Ulrich von Gradwitz and Georg Znaeym are lifelong enemies, their families locked for generations in a bitter feud over a strip of forest. On a stormy night each patrols the woods hoping to catch and kill the other. They meet face to face - but before either can fire, a great beech tree crashes down and pins them both to the ground, side by side and helpless. Trapped together through the cold night, the two men slowly soften, forgive, and swear to end the feud and become friends. They shout together for help, and at last figures come running through the trees toward them. Ulrich looks, and names what is really approaching: wolves.
The Happy Prince
The jewelled statue of the Happy Prince looks down over a city and, seeing its suffering poor, weeps. He persuades a Swallow lingering on his way to Egypt to become his messenger, stripping the ruby from his sword, the sapphires of his eyes, and finally the gold leaf from his body to relieve the sick, the hungry, and the cold. Blinded and shabby, the Prince keeps the loyal Swallow beside him until the bird, too weak from the frost, dies at his feet - and the Prince's leaden heart snaps in two. The town councillors melt the ugly statue down, but the cracked heart and the dead bird are carried up to God, who names them the two most precious things in the city.
A White Heron
Sylvia, a shy nine-year-old who has blossomed since leaving the crowded town to live with her grandmother in the Maine woods, meets a friendly young ornithologist. He is hunting a rare white heron and offers ten dollars - a fortune to them - to anyone who will show him its hidden nest. Drawn to the young man and tempted by the money, Sylvia rises before dawn and climbs a towering pine, from whose top she at last sees the heron rise from its nest by the sea. But when the moment comes to tell, she cannot betray the bird. She keeps silent, choosing the wild creature and the woods over money and the stranger's approval.
The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky
Marshal Jack Potter of Yellow Sky, Texas, rides home on the train with his new bride, sheepish and anxious about how the town will take a marriage he told no one about. Meanwhile, back in Yellow Sky, the drunken gunfighter Scratchy Wilson goes on a rampage, shooting up the empty streets and hunting his old adversary Potter for a fight. The two men come face to face outside Potter's house - Scratchy armed and spoiling for a duel, Potter unarmed and standing beside his wife. When Potter explains that he is married, Scratchy is utterly disarmed: marriage is outside the code of the Old West he lives by. He lowers his gun and walks away, and an era ends without a shot.
God Sees the Truth, But Waits
The young merchant Aksionov is wrongly convicted of a murder and robbery committed by another man and is sent to hard labor in Siberia, where he spends twenty-six years growing quiet, prayerful, and respected. One day a new convict, Makar Semyonich, arrives - and Aksionov slowly realizes that this is the very man whose crime destroyed his life. When Aksionov discovers Makar secretly digging an escape tunnel, the guards question him, but he refuses to betray the man who ruined him. Shaken by such mercy, Makar confesses the old murder in the night and begs forgiveness. Aksionov forgives him and feels his heart grow light - and when at last an order for his release arrives, he has already died.