Symbols and Signs

    Symbols and Signs

                                                    

I could spend the whole day trying to figure out the symbols and signs of this essay, but instead I decided to understand the story.  Yes, there are two stories within the essay.   The first one is the story of the main character; the son of the couple, and the second story is about the life struggles of an immigrant couple. 

In the beginning of the story, part 1, the writer gives his readers many clues about the personality and life experiences of the son.  This is very clear in the first part of the essay when everything is going wrong for the parents .  All sources of bad events are occurring at the same time.   A clear sign of what the writer is trying to tell us is in the sentence when he describes the bird in the paddle  “A few feet away, under a swaying and dripping tree, a tiny half-dead unfledged bird was helplessly twitching in a puddle”.  It is obvious to me that the author is using the bird as an allegory to describe the son and how he feels; half dead, helpless, and twitching with not hopes in life.  The son had tried to commit suicide four times already.  He suffers from "Referential mania," which it a horrible disease and terrible way of living.  He wishes to die, but his parents won’t allow this to happen because if he dies, they have no reason to be alive.

In part II of the story, we see the mother reliving ever stage of her son’s life as she is looking through pictures of him.  What is apparent is that the details about her son’s life are merely a reflection of her own.  This is the story of the entire event that pushes them to immigrate to a foreign country.  A good example of this is the part when the author describes Aunt Rosa.  “Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths--until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about”.  Throughout the entire essay, it is easy to notice the symbols and signs of their lives in this new country. They have not adapted to this new life. They have survived, yes, but everything in their life is gray and sad.   All those little details symbolize their bleak lives in the U.S.  They do not have money, and they depend on a brother for economic support.  The family appears to have failed to integrate into English America as do not speak the language, the father still reads the Russian newspaper, and they have a Russian doctor.

All these elements combined make me believe that the second story of the essay is about the life of an immigrant family, and their struggles before and after the move to a new country.   In the process of immigrating, they have lost all they had before, and now they depend of others to survive.  This makes perfect sense to me since I have seen this happen many times with immigrant families.

Part III, signs of traditions and believes.  The father wakes up in the middle of the night and says "I can't sleep,". "Why," she asked, "why can't you sleep? You were tired."  "I can't sleep because I am dying," he said and lay down on the couch.

I feel that the feeling that the father is having at this time is a “presentiment” – a feeling people believe to have when someone close to them is about to die.  This is a tradition in many cultures around the world.  The father knows in his heart that his son is dying and that is why he can’t sleep.  He also knows that once the son dies, there will be no reason for his wife and him to stay alive, since their world is sad and gray.  Finally, when the phone rings the third time in the middle of the night you can always assume that it is not good news.  People do not dial the wrong number three times, and it is said that bad things always happen in series of three.  I’m certain the phone call means that the son has died, and with him the two others members of the family.  Bad new always come on series of three.