Symbolism in Short Stories
Browse our curated collection of short stories featuring symbolism with literary analysis and discussion guides.
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. Their first wish for two hundred pounds is fulfilled when their son Herbert is killed in a factory accident and the company pays that exact sum in compensation. Grief-stricken, Mrs. White insists on using the second wish to bring Herbert back. When a terrible knocking begins at the door, Mr. White realizes what horrors may await and uses the third wish to undo the second before his wife can open the door.
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.