Content Warning: This section of the guide contains outdated references to psychiatric conditions, including the concept of “madness.”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



Structurally, “Signs and Symbols” is two stories at once, with one hidden behind the other. On the surface, the narrative follows the mother and father as they navigate a single day filled with mundane hardships, which include their failure in delivering a birthday gift to their son, who has a psychiatric disorder. This outward story masks a second, inner narrative, in which the son is the central character. The son’s journey from “surprised” (Paragraph 10) baby to “ill-shaven” (Paragraph 3) teenager, from insomniac European to suicidal American, is always mediated through the lens of the first story; his experience masked by the perspectives of his parents and his medical caretakers. With the son’s tale buried, the reader is left with the task of trying to sort through the outer narrative to make sense of the inner one.

While the two layered stories are at odds with one another, as exemplified by the fact that the mother and father never actually interact with the son during the narrative, they share a focus on Responses to Suffering. The text describes the family’s various challenges—poverty, isolation, depression, poor physical and mental health, even bad weather—at length, suggesting that hardship and suffering are ingrained in the human experience, while exploring the characters’ methods of coping with the brutal nature of reality.

Along with its focus on suffering, the story’s related theme of Alienation and Loneliness demonstrates Nabokov’s connection to literary Modernism. Writing in 1948, soon after the conclusion of World War II and the Holocaust, Nabokov uses “Signs and Symbols” to explore such modernist ideas as the challenges of 20^th-century living and the increasing isolation of the individual amid modern society. While none of the three central characters is in immediate danger, except possibly to themselves, they still struggle to cope with the hostile and unforgiving aspects of postwar American society. These difficulties are never resolved, suggesting there are no easy answers to the family’s predicament.

To this modernist subject matter, Nabokov incorporates his own postmodern tendencies to complicate and enrich the story. The frequent use of irony—as in the strangely upbeat attitudes of the hospital staff, or the deadpan recounting of Aunt Rosa’s “fussy” life and horrible death—reinforce the family’s isolation and suffering, while highlighting the absurdity of life. The mediated narration of the son’s story, in which the reader can only access his experience through others’ perspectives, indicates a postmodern interest in experimentation and fragmentation.

Per postmodern convention, the story is self-consciously told as a story. Nabokov expresses a playful attitude toward the relationship between the author and the reader. One way to understand the story is as a game between Nabokov and his readers. Leaving the reader with a murky, layered storyline and ambiguous ending, Nabokov litters the rest of the narrative with hints that may explain, for example, who is making the third telephone call, or what place the son ends up amid Death, Life, and In Between.

Some of this symbolism is clear, as in the connection between the “tiny unfledged bird” (Paragraph 4) and the son, who was “learning to fly” (Paragraph 6). Other moments of potential symbolism are far more opaque, however, such as the mother’s playing cards, or the colors of the jelly jars. These details invite analysis. They are part of Nabokov’s metafictional technique, in which he seduces the reader into over-analysis, inviting them to exude the same symptoms as the son. By connecting the reading process to the son’s self-oriented psychosis, the story invites the reader to consider their own biases, as well as the absurdity of literary analysis itself.

“Signs and Symbols” is grounded by its intimate portrayal of the relationship between its central characters. Its treatment of the mother and father’s relationship gives the story a sense of verisimilitude. At first, their relationship is strained. They both struggle with their son’s condition, with the father lapsing into a melancholic silence and the mother feeling “the mounting pressure of tears” (Paragraph 5). This silence continues after they return to their apartment and go about their nightly routine. However, the story’s transition from narration to dialogue for most of its final third marks a positive shift in their relationship, but this positive shift is based only on the sudden optimism that they can successfully care for their son at home. The mother and father’s back-and-forth conversation indicates they are more in sync with each other’s thoughts and feelings and are better able to support one another in their joint plan, finding a common goal that would seemingly alleviate the pressures they endure. The reader can sense that this optimism is likely misguided, as the son wouldn’t be hospitalized if there was another option. The reader has also learned about his elaborate suicide attempts and how he almost succeeded recently, even under professional supervision.

The story portrays the immigrant life in America with a high degree of realism. This attention to detail—as seen for instance in the mother’s drab clothing in comparison to her next-door neighbor’s, or the father’s Russian-language newspaper—makes the characters more dynamic and believable, which in turn generates sympathy in the reader.

That sympathy reaches its height as the mother reviews the old photographs and reminisces about her family’s many travels and difficulties. In rapid order, she confronts the memories of her dead relatives, abandoned homes, and her son’s childhood troubles—“the shame, the pity (and), the humiliating difficulties of the journey” (Paragraph 10). In the space of a single paragraph, and with sparse, straightforward lines, the story encapsulates a life of exile and hardship to evoke a sense of desolation.

The mother’s thoughts that follow her deluge of memories represent the emotional heart of the story. In a sort of epiphany, she holds in her mind the “recurrent waves of pain” (Paragraph 11) that her family has had to endure: the hurt and waste and neglect. The world, she realizes, is full of “tenderness,” (Paragraph 11) but that tenderness is always temporary and elusive. Suffering is endemic to life, and nothing can change that fact. However, by facing this realization head on, the mother is, in a way, able to overcome it. She leaves her epiphany with neither sadness, nor fear, but instead with acceptance.

Acceptance, or lack of acceptance, is also pertinent to the story’s conclusion. The repetition of the telephone calls builds the dramatic tension, but then the story abruptly ends, leaving the reader hovering in the dark, not knowing who is calling or what will become of the son. This ending hangs in the balance between the two stories within “Signs and Symbols.” Its ambiguity self-consciously invites readers to probe the text for clues as to what comes next—clues that may or may not be there—which reflects the son’s perspective. It also invokes the mother’s attitude toward an ambiguous and intangible future: acceptance.