【正文】 ar structure of ideas, whereas a symbol includes permanent objective value, independent of the meanings that it may suggest. In a broad sense, all stories are symbolic, that is, the writer lends the characters and their actions some special significance. Of course, this is to think of symbol in an extremely broad and inclusive way. For the usual purpose of reading a story and understanding it, there is probably little point in looking for symbolism in every word, in every stick or stone, in every striking fo a match, in every minor character. But to refuse to think about the symbolic meanings would be another way to misread a story. So to be on the alert for symbols when reading fiction is perhaps wiser than to ignore them. How, then, do we recognize a symbol in fiction when we meet it? Fortunately, the storyteller often givens the symbol particular emphasis. It may be mentioned repeatedly throughout the story。 something is seen as its own thing, divorced from the burden of representing anything other than itself. What Is Image? “An ‘image’ is that which represents an intellectual and emotional plex in an instant of time.” (Ezra Pound) In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd。 these need not be mental ‘pictures’, but may appeal to senses other than sight. Images suggesting further meanings and associations in ways that go beyond the fairly simple identifications of metaphor and simile are often called symbols. The Five Senses Responding to Imaginative language Visual Imagery: Imagery of Sight Visual imagery is different from visual perception because visual perception requires the object to be actually present and visual imagery does not. Aural Imagery: Imagery of Sound Auditory imagery is something that represents a sound, which can be revealed both in poems and stories. Olfactory Imagery: Imagery of Smell Olfactory imagery stimulates the sense of smell, which olfaction’s unique cognitive architecture of evocation have led some to conclude that there is no capacity for olfactory imagery. a. Selfreports of olfactory can resemble those obtained for actual perception. b. Imaging an odor can produce effects similar to actual perception. c. Olfactory perception and memory—based images can interact. 4. Tactile Imagery: Imagery of Touch Tactile imagery stimulates the sense of touch, which is also called Haptic Imagery. 5. Gustatory Imagery: Imagery of Taste Gustatory imagery stimulates the sense of taste. “ ‘Have a dill pickle,’ he said. He wanted to share with us: That seemed to me so right, so—you know what I mean?” From A Dill Pickle by Katherine Mansfield 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 character’s body or an attribute may convey symbolic meaning, for example, a baleful eye in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The TellTale Heart.” 4. Symbol used in works of fiction is the symbolic act Another kind of symbol monly employed in works of fiction is the symbolic act: an act or a gesture with larger significance than its literal meaning. Captain Ahab in Melville’s MobyDick deliberately snaps his tobacco pipe and throws it away before setting 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 boy’s father in Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”: it is an act of no mere destroying a barn, but an 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 father’s memories of the “waste and extravagance of war” and the “element of fire 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 bines 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, 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 plexity is municated. (Holman and Harmon, A Handbook to Literature, 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 power 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。 whereas a symbol functions like an image but differs from it in going beyond the evocation of the objective referent by making that 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 may even be indicated in the title (“Araby,” “Barn Burning,” “A Clean, WellLighted Place”). At times, a crucial symbol will open a story or end it. Unless an object, act, or character is given some special emphasis and importance, we may generally feel safe in taking it at face value. But an object, an act, or a character is surely symbolic if, when we finish the story, we realize that it was that burning of a barn—which led us to the theme, the essential meaning of the story. Chapter Eight Image The image is seen as being one of two things: something that represents a thing in the “real” world。 Petals on a wet, black bough.