Story #11: The Big Symbol Story

Story #11: The Big Symbol Story: read Raymond Carver’s "Why Don't You Dance?" and think about how the ordinary things of the story become symbols of the emotional action. Thus, the man, clearly recently broken up, has put everything from the inside of his house out on the lawn. The young couple, newly in love, represents his past as he represents their future, and they inhabit his exteriorized interior, putting together their life together from the objects that represent his broken life. The big symbol in this story is the house as a relationship/marriage. Similarly, in”A Story about the Body,” the big symbol is the blue bowl of rose petals covering dead bees. Can you decipher it? Now write your own 1-3 page story with a big symbol like this, in which an object, a setting, a repeated descriptive element, comes to take on special meaning that ties into the emotional situation in the story.