In high school, my senior English teacher had my
classmates and I memorize literary definition of symbol that he gave us. Till
this day I can still recite the definition verbatim, “An object, animate or
inanimate, which represents or stands for something else. A literary symbol combines
an image with a concept. It may be public or private, universal or local. In literary
works we find instances of the use of a concrete image to express an emotion of
an abstract idea”. Thinking back on it
now, I guess that is the best way to describe a symbol. Symbol is whatever a
person wants something to stand for.
In religion,
you always hear of martyrs that die for sticking to what they believe in. A friend
of mine, Renee, and I were walking out of class after hearing about martyrs and
she says “I just think it’s a bit overdramatic how these people got themselves
killed because they couldn’t hide what they believed, they should have just
kept their mouths shut and they wouldn’t have died”. In all honesty I was
shocked that she had said something like that. I had always believed martyrs
were pretty amazing in their own right. Not that they died but that they didn’t
let people change what they believed in and that even knowing they would be in
trouble if they continued to speak out. So it had surprised me to her say that,
I just assumed others thought the same way.
Going back to definition I gave earlier,
I think that the same object having different meanings to different people has
to with it being on where they got the symbol from. It all has to do with how
people were taught to perceive things, each person was taught differently and
each person has their own unique mindset. So what s symbol represents is all
focused on the person who sees the symbol. |
| St. Ursula |
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