Signs and Symbols

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1948

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Story Analysis

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

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Themes

Responses to Suffering

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains outdated references to psychiatric conditions, including the concept of “madness.” This section of the guide also discusses suicide and the Holocaust.

The major characters of “Signs and Symbols” are each marked by the intense suffering and misfortune in their lives. The story’s focus on this suffering suggests that hardship and grief are inherent aspects of life. At the same time, however, the characters’ diverging reactions to their misfortunes indicate that suffering need not be crippling—that it may be possible to forge ahead despite the cruelty of nature and human society.

Suffering is everywhere in the narrative. The son is confined to a psychiatric hospital because of mental delusions and attempting to die by suicide. His parents struggle to address their son’s mental condition amid the backdrop of other ongoing problems—they are poor, aging, and estranged from their family and homeland. Their lives have been shaped by the horrors of the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust, and now their small family unit has fallen apart. Reinforcing and amplifying their experience, the world around them suffers as well. The pounding rain, helpless bird, foul subway air, and dingy apartment make clear that hardship and difficulty are inescapable and ever-present.

With suffering established as a surety, the story explores the different ways that people respond to the harshness of reality. The son’s reaction is perhaps the most extreme. Uprooted repeatedly as a child, and then facing the “ugly, vicious, backward children” (Paragraph 10) in the special school in America, the son escapes into his own mind. Rejecting a reality that he found to be cruel and inhospitable, he retreats into himself, becoming sure that the outside world is a mere reflection of his own personality. His suicide attempts, in which he wants to “tear a hole in his world and escape” (Paragraph 6), underline his all-consuming wish to flee the world’s suffering. The fact that he can only do so by dying reveals the limits of this method of responding to the injustices of life.

The father, who faces the additional suffering and disgrace of having to rely on his brother Isaac for the family’s financial support, initially responds to his suffering with melancholy. After their failed visit to the hospital, he becomes quiet and brooding, ignoring his wife in favor of escaping into the newspaper. However, his mood turns when he comes up with a plan to bring his son home. His renewed “high spirits” (Paragraph 20) hinge on the thought that the three of them can be together again. The father’s sudden change of demeanor shows him responding to suffering by focusing on what is most important to him—his family—while ignoring what he cannot change.

The mother reveals a third way to respond to suffering: with stoic forbearance. Reviewing the photographs that spell out her family’s years of tragedy and misfortune, she comes to the realization that living means “accepting the loss of one joy after another” (Paragraph 11). This is a sad realization, but she holds in her mind the “incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world” (Paragraph 11), even if the fate of that tenderness is ultimately to be “crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness” (Paragraph 11). Unlike her husband, she does not oscillate between melancholy and flushed high spirits. She accepts the harsh world for what it is.

While the narrative has made clear that suffering cannot be avoided, the characters’ different responses indicate that life can move forward despite serious hardships. Just as the action will continue after the abrupt end of the story, the parents will continue to persist, to respond to a deeply flawed world in the best way they can.

Alienation and Loneliness

The conflict within “Signs and Symbols” centers on the feelings of alienation and loneliness that Nabokov often portrays as defining modern society. The main characters of the story—the mother, father, and son—struggle to find a sense of belonging and community with the Americans around them, acutely aware of their outsider status as emigrants from a foreign culture. They are also estranged from one another, each caught in their own thoughts and preoccupations, largely unable to find any solace or relief in their lonely existences.

The family’s status as Russian immigrants to America sets them apart from their neighbors and acquaintances, keeping them isolated from the larger society. This isolation seeps into the story in seemingly small ways: the mother’s plain clothing and makeup as compared to her American neighbor’s, the father’s hesitation to speak on the phone because of his poor English, the description of Isaac as a “real American” (Paragraph 2), unlike them. While no instance of isolation is heavily emphasized, together they create a lonely experience for the mother and father, who appear unable to engage with the people around them. They become detached observers, watching the unfolding lives of the Americans on the subway and across the street from their apartment, without entering those lives or participating in a shared community.

Not just separated from the American community, the family members are also isolated from one another. The son’s mental detachment from the world is mirrored in his physical isolation in the hospital—an isolation underlined by the fact that his parents never manage to see him during their attempted visit. Repeated references to the mother and father’s silence indicate that they are unable to express their thoughts and feelings to one another. Their mix-up with the apartment keys reinforces the idea that they are out of sync with each other, having to grapple with their harsh lives and son’s illness alone.

The story largely does not resolve or ameliorate its overarching feeling of loneliness, and even the father’s better spirits during the couple’s midnight chat feel misguided and too hopeful. The story’s ending again focuses on the family’s isolation. On the phone, the mother and unknown caller cannot seem to understand one another; they are too alienated from each other to find common ground. When the phone rings the third time, the reader joins this circle of incomprehensibility, left out of contact, unable to bridge the gap between themselves and whoever is on the other end of the line.

Death, Life, and In Between

Nabokov’s mixture of clear and oblique references to death and mortality invites readers to view life and death not as binary opposites but instead as part of a spectrum. Death, the story suggests, is part of the ongoing experience of living, while life can be found even amid the most inanimate of objects.

While none of the central characters are literally dead, at least at the story’s beginning, death surrounds them on all sides. The son repeatedly tries to die by suicide. His parents’ advanced age and ill health put them on the precipice of death as well. The mother reflects on the “recurrent waves of pain” (Paragraph 11) that they both endure, while the father’s “horrible, mask-like grimace” (Paragraph 9) and his “swollen veins and brown-spotted skin” (Paragraph 5) underline their approaching deaths. His comment, “I can’t sleep because I am dying” (Paragraph 15), shows him acknowledging his own inevitable mortality.

The external world echoes the family members’ liminal existence, hovering somewhere between life and death. The subway train that “lost its life current between two stations” (Paragraph 3), the tiny bird “helplessly twitching in a puddle” (Paragraph 4), and Aunt Rosa, dead but vibrantly alive in the mother’s memory and photographs, straddle the border between living and the dying, never fully one or the other. As the living characters move closer to death, the son brings inanimate objects closer to life, ascribing hidden motivations to the “clouds… sun flecks… (and) coats in store windows” (Paragraph 7).

This blending of the living and the dead, the animate and inanimate, suggests that death is more than a final end to a person’s life. Instead, death is an ongoing experience, present both internally and in the larger world. It can wax and wane, though perhaps never be fully understood.

The story’s ending reinforces the ambiguous and intangible nature of death. It is possible that the final telephone call the parents receive involves their son. Perhaps the hospital is calling to confirm his death by suicide, or perhaps instead he has escaped the hospital and is calling them himself. He could be alive, or dead, but the story will not say either way. Instead, it leaves the reader in the dark, with the son’s fate still hovering somewhere in between.