Analysis of Vladimir Nabokov's Story "Symbols and Signs" (Essay Sample)

Hope Farmer
Professor Crenshaw
Lit-300
21 April 2017
“Symbols and Signs” Through Reader-Response and Psychoanalytic Lenses
The story entitled “Symbols and Signs”, which was written by Vladimir Nabokov, has undoubtedly been read through various lenses through the decades. Reader-Response is one critical lens one could look through when examining this short story. Another is Psychoanalytic theory, which would support a theory in which the young man in this story succeeded at his suicide. When the reader’s reaction matters, elements of the story which provoke those reactions can be brought to light. This is the value of Reader-Response Theory, and it ultimately adds meaning to the literary work itself. The value of Psychoanalytic Theory in respect to this story is the proof of theory that the young, deranged man succeeded at committing suicide, and the symbols that reveal this substory are essential to understanding the work’s psychological meaning.
Reader-Response Theory is a type of literary criticism that rose in Germany and in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s (Bertens 96). Two of the major influences in this school of criticism were Wolfgang Iser and his friend and colleague, Hans-Robert Jauss. Iser was the first to introduce the idea that the reader mattered to the meaning and value of a work of literature. He theorized that every text was written for an ‘implied reader’, who instead of being the actual reader in real life, is an imaginary reader who will interpret the text based on his or her preconceived notions, experiences, and so on (Bertens 97). Iser asserted that every piece of literature “contains a number of “gaps” or “indeterminate elements” which the reader must fill by active participation, and he observes that meaning evolves through the convergence of the text and the reader, as the active and creative reader fills the “gaps” or the “unwritten implications” by exercising his/her imagination” (Mambrol). Reader-Response theory, to this day, still allows audiences to matter in the experience of reading