An elderly couple is stuck on what to get their adult son for his birthday present because he suffers from complex and volatile delusions that make any present a potentially problematic object. Do these precise and specific references mean anything, are they ways to create mood and atmosphere, or are they decoys for readers eager to attribute importance to randomness? “Signs and Symbols” has brought out either skepticism or overwrought analysis from its readers and critics ever since it first came out. Telling the story of an elderly couple whose attempted visit to their mentally disturbed son goes awry, the story is filled with detailed and seemingly significant descriptions of events, people, and things. This story is a very short piece of prose that either contains within it an incredibly complex puzzle that the reader must solve, or is itself a piece of satire making fun of the way readers try to over-read and over-analyze fiction. One of these is “Signs and Symbols,” which appeared in the magazine in 1948. The renowned and influential author Vladimir Nabokov, who is most famous for his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, also published several stories in The New Yorker.
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