Symbolism in Literature: Definition, Types and Examples

Symbolism is the use of a concrete thing, such as an object, a colour, a place or an action, to stand for an idea or feeling beyond itself, while it still does its ordinary job in the story. A green light on a dock is a green light on a dock. In The Great Gatsby it is also everything Gatsby wants and cannot reach.

The word has a second meaning: Symbolism with a capital S was a movement in French poetry and art in the 1880s and 1890s. This page covers both, with the definitions in their authors' own words, famous examples checked in the texts themselves, the difference between a symbol, a motif and an allegory, and a method for using symbolism in your own novel without hitting the reader over the head.

What Is Symbolism?

The everyday definition is simple. The Cambridge Dictionary gives "the use of symbols in art, literature, films, etc. to represent ideas", and the Oxford Learner's Dictionary "the use of symbols to represent ideas, especially in art and literature".

Critics use "symbol" more narrowly. M. H. Abrams, in A Glossary of Literary Terms, notes that in the broadest sense "a symbol is anything which signifies something", so every word is a symbol. "In discussing literature, however, the term symbol is applied only to a word or phrase that signifies an object or event which in its turn signifies something, or has a range of reference, beyond itself."

That double step is the whole idea. The words point to a thing, and the thing points further. A literary symbol has two properties:

• It is literal first. It exists in the story world and the plot needs it. Remove the meaning and it still has a job.
• It means more than it says. The extra meaning is suggested, not stated, and it can be more than one thing at once.

The word itself comes from the Greek symbolon. The Liddell-Scott-Jones lexicon's first sense is a "tally", "each of two halves or corresponding pieces" of an object that two parties "broke between them, each party keeping one piece". A symbol was half of something, and it meant nothing until it met its other half. In a novel, the reader brings the other half.

What Was the Symbolist Movement?

Symbolism (capital S) was a late nineteenth-century movement, mostly French, in poetry first and then painting and theatre. Cambridge's specialised sense: "a type of art and literature developed in the late 19th century that tries to express ideas or states of mind rather than represent the real world".

Its manifesto was written by the poet Jean Moréas and printed in Le Figaro on 18 September 1886. Symbolist poetry, he wrote, seeks "à vêtir l'Idée d'une forme sensible": to clothe the Idea in a form the senses can take in. Stéphane Mallarmé, interviewed by Jules Huret in 1891, gave the movement its best-known line: "Nommer un objet, c'est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu à peu : le suggérer, voilà le rêve." To name an object is to remove three quarters of the pleasure of the poem, which comes from guessing little by little; to suggest it, that is the dream.

If you searched "symbolism" for a history of art essay, the movement is your subject: Mallarmé, Verlaine and Rimbaud in poetry, Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon in painting. For writers of fiction, the lowercase sense is the useful one, though Mallarmé's point about suggestion holds for both.

What Are the Types of Symbols in Literature?

Conventional symbols. Abrams: "Some symbols are 'conventional' or 'public'", and his first example is "the Cross". The writer borrows a meaning the reader already holds. They are quick, but the meaning is fixed, so they can feel second-hand. They are also cultural rather than universal: white is the colour of weddings in much of Europe and America and of mourning in parts of East and South Asia, so think about who your readers are.

Contextual symbols. These mean nothing outside the book. The story teaches the reader what they mean, usually by placing them at key moments. Almost every symbol a novelist remembers from school is this kind.

Archetypal symbols. Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), called an archetype "a symbol which connects one poem with another". Water, roads, seasons and thresholds recur across literature, and readers feel their pull even without being told. The same idea underlies character archetypes.

Symbolic actions. A gesture can carry meaning the same way an object does. Burning a letter, cutting hair, locking a door: the deed is literal, and it says something the character cannot.

What Are Famous Examples of Symbolism?

Each quote below was checked in the book itself, not in a study guide.

The green light in The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925). Nick first sees Gatsby stretching his arms "toward the dark water" and can make out nothing "except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock" (Chapter 1). What makes it a lesson in craft is Chapter 5. With Daisy in his house at last, Gatsby mentions the light, and Fitzgerald lets the symbol collapse back into an object: "Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. ... Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one." The symbol only worked while the goal was out of reach.

The scarlet letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850). Hester Prynne is made to wear an A for adultery. Hawthorne describes it as an object first, "in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold-thread" (Chapter II). Years of charity later, the town reads the same object differently: "many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification. They said that it meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman's strength" (Chapter XIII). The symbol never changes. What it means does.

The white whale (Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 1851). Melville gives the symbol a chapter of its own, "The Whiteness of the Whale" (Chapter 42), in which Ishmael tries and fails to say what it means: "It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here". A symbol that resists one meaning can carry a whole book.

The mockingbird (Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960). In Chapter 10 Atticus tells his children, "Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." Miss Maudie explains why: "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy". Lee states the meaning through a character, then lets the reader apply it to Tom Robinson and Boo Radley without saying so.

The wooden leg (Flannery O'Connor, "Good Country People", 1955). O'Connor explained her own symbol in the essay "Writing Short Stories" (Mystery and Manners, 1969): "In good fiction, certain of the details will tend to accumulate meaning from the action of the story itself, and when this happens they become symbolic in the way they work." Of the artificial leg that a Bible salesman steals from a proud woman: "If you want to say that the wooden leg is a symbol, you can say that. But it is a wooden leg first, and as a wooden leg it is absolutely necessary to the story."

Ernest Hemingway's rain in A Farewell to Arms is another, and it is set out line by line in our page on foreshadowing, because there the symbol also warns of what is coming.

What Is the Difference Between a Symbol, a Motif and an Allegory?

Symbol vs motif. A symbol can do its work once. A motif is defined by repetition. A symbol that keeps coming back, like the green light, is both.

Symbol vs allegory. Samuel Taylor Coleridge drew the line in The Statesman's Manual (1816). An allegory "is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses". A symbol, by contrast, "always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible". In John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), Christian falls into a bog, and Bunyan tells you what it is: "The name of the slough was Despond." That is allegory, a picture with a label. The green light has no label, and it is a real light first.

Symbol vs theme. A symbol is something you can point to on the page. The theme is the claim the whole book makes, as set out in what theme in a story means. A symbol is one of the ways a theme becomes visible.

How Do You Use Symbolism in Your Writing?

1. Start with the story, not the symbol. Most strong symbols are found in the first draft and strengthened in the second. Look for an object that is already there at the turning points.
2. Make it literal first. Give the object a practical job in the plot. O'Connor's test: it should be "absolutely necessary to the story" even if nobody reads it as a symbol.
3. Place it at pressure points. Opening, midpoint, climax, last page. A symbol gathers meaning from the scenes around it, so put it where the scenes matter.
4. Let it change. The scarlet A means shame, then Able. The green light means hope, then nothing. A symbol whose meaning shifts tracks the character's change.
5. Never translate it. Do not have the narrator explain what it stands for. If a character states the meaning, as Atticus does, make it a line of dialogue with its own reason to be said.
6. Keep it specific. "A rose" is conventional. "The rose she pressed in her father's Bible in 1962" belongs to this book alone.
7. Check the count. Too few appearances and readers miss it; too many and it starts to wave at them. Three to five strong moments usually carry a novel-length symbol.

This is show, don't tell at the level of a single object: the symbol shows what the narrator never says.

A Worked Example

Nell is fifteen. Her mother has left, and her blue raincoat still hangs by the door.

1. Literal. It rains on the first morning. Nell's own coat is at school, so she grabs her mother's to walk the dog. It is too long in the sleeves. (The reader meets a coat, nothing more.)
2. Loaded. At school a girl asks whose coat that is. Nell says "Mine" and keeps it on all day, though the classroom is warm. (The coat now carries her refusal to let go.)
3. Turned. In a storm her little brother has no coat. She puts the blue one on him and walks home soaked. (It stops meaning the mother who left and starts meaning the care Nell now gives.)
4. Resolved. In spring her mother phones. Nell listens, says little, and afterwards notices the sleeves no longer cover her hands. (It fits. The book never says she has grown up.)

Now the heavy-handed version of scene 4: "The coat was like her mother's love, wrapped around her, and now she realised she had grown into it." Every word of that is true to the story, and it kills the symbol, because it does the reader's half of the work. The sleeves do it in nine words and leave the reader the pleasure Mallarmé described.

How Do You Track a Symbol in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app for Windows, macOS and Linux. Its Codex keeps reference entries beside the manuscript, and it finds and underlines every use of an entry's name as you write. An object that carries meaning can have an entry with its literal and symbolic sides kept separately.

1. Open the Codex from its button in the menu bar. In Items, click the + (New entry) and choose Item.
2. Name it ("the blue coat"). In the line under the name ("One line: who or what this is"), write both halves: "Mum's raincoat. Absence, then care."
3. Open the Type menu and choose Edit types…. Type "Symbol" in Add new…, click Add, and give it a colour with its swatch. Close the box and pick Symbol from the menu. Every symbol in the book now carries the same coloured badge.
4. Under Also called, add the other words the book uses for it, such as "raincoat" or "Mum's coat". Each is found in the text too.
5. Use Description for the object as the reader first meets it, and Origin for where it came from in the story. Then click Add fields, enter "Meaning" as the Group name and "What it suggests" as the Field name, choose Multi-line, and click Add. Write each planned stage: refusal, care, growing up.
6. As you draft, the name is underlined in your chapters. Rest the pointer on it for the entry's card, which shows the Symbol badge and your one-line summary, with Open beside to keep the entry next to the chapter.
7. When you revise, open the entry's Mentions tab. It lists every chapter that names the symbol, in manuscript order, with a count and a bar for each. Check that the first mention is plain and literal, that the symbol is present at the climax, and that no chapter's bar towers over the rest. Click a chapter to open it at the first mention.

If one of the words also turns up in other senses, the Tracking tab has Not this entry, for phrases that hold the name but mean something else, one per line. A symbol that has to pay off in the plot as well as in meaning works like Chekhov's gun, and the same entry tracks both jobs.

Common Mistakes

• Explaining the symbol. If the narrator says what it means, it has become a label.
• Choosing the meaning before the object. A symbol picked from a dictionary of symbols, then dropped into a scene, reads as decoration.
• No literal job. If the plot would not miss the object, readers notice it is only there to mean something.
• Too many symbols. Three objects all standing for lost innocence compete with each other. One strong symbol beats five weak ones.
• Calling an allegory symbolism. Animal Farm and The Pilgrim's Progress are allegories: the whole story maps onto ideas one to one. Many guides list them as simple symbolism.
• Freezing the meaning. A symbol that means exactly the same thing on page 300 as on page 3 has not taken part in the story.

What Do Symbolism Guides Get Wrong?

• "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." It is credited to Sigmund Freud everywhere, but Quote Investigator found no evidence he said it. The earliest known attribution is a 1950 footnote by Allen Wheelis in the journal Psychiatry, more than a decade after Freud's death. The psychologist Alan C. Elms, who studied quotes credited to Freud, concluded there are "many reasons to conclude that Freud never said it or anything like it".
• "Hemingway said there is no symbolism in his books." He wrote to the art historian Bernard Berenson in September 1952 about The Old Man and the Sea: "There isn't any symbolysm (mis-spelled). The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man." The same passage ends: "What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know." He objected to symbols laid on from outside, not to meaning that grows from the thing itself, which is close to O'Connor's view (Ernest Hemingway on Writing, ed. Larry W. Phillips, quoting Selected Letters, p. 780).
• "The green light symbolises the American Dream." That is one reading, and a common one, but Fitzgerald never says it. In the text it is tied first to Daisy, and the last page widens it to "the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us" (the Project Gutenberg text; Fitzgerald's own word, defended to his editor at proof stage, was "orgastic"). Teach it as a reading, not as the answer.

Sources

Retrieved 1 November 2026.

• Cambridge Dictionary, symbolism, both senses.
• Oxford Learner's Dictionaries, symbolism.
• M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6th ed. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993), "Symbol", read through Open Library's search inside (archive.org). Later editions change "has a range of reference" to "suggests a range of reference". The "conventional" or "public" line is checked in the first edition (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1957) and the fourth (1981) (archive.org).
• H. G. Liddell, R. Scott and H. S. Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, σύμβολον (Perseus).
• Jean Moréas, "Le Symbolisme", Le Figaro, 18 September 1886, reprinted in Les Premières Armes du symbolisme (1889) (Wikisource). Translation ours.
• Jules Huret, Enquête sur l'évolution littéraire (Charpentier, 1891), "M. Stéphane Mallarmé", pp. 55-65 (Wikisource). Translation ours.
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Statesman's Manual (1816), pp. 36-37 (archive.org).
• Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957), Second Essay (archive.org).
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), chapters 1, 5 and 9 (Project Gutenberg).
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850), chapters II and XIII (Project Gutenberg).
• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851), chapter 42 (Project Gutenberg).
• John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) (Project Gutenberg).
• Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (Lippincott, 1960), chapter 10, checked against several printed editions through Open Library's search inside.
• Flannery O'Connor, "Writing Short Stories", in Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969) (archive.org).
• Larry W. Phillips (ed.), Ernest Hemingway on Writing (Scribner, 1984; Touchstone, 1999), quoting the letter to Bernard Berenson, 1952, Selected Letters, p. 780 (archive.org).
• Quote Investigator, "Sometimes a Cigar Is Just a Cigar", 2011.