Something By Tolstoi

700 Words3 Pages
Symbolism is one of the key techniques that Tennessee Williams uses to express his creativity. Symbolism is the act of representing things through other objects or meanings. In Tennessee Williams’ writing, he expresses so much detail in his stories by just using one symbol. In the story, “Something by Tolstoi,” you will see the symbols used by Tennessee Williams. In, “Something by Tolstoi”, there is a married Jewish man, named Jacob, who owns a bookstore. His wife, Lila, who is a gentile, wants more in her life. She wants to be an actress, so she leaves her husband. Jacob doesn’t want to believe it, but eventually forgets about it. Then, a long time later, his wife comes back, and wants Jacob to remember those good times they had long ago. But he doesn’t remember, he only thinks it was a story written by another author. During all of this, a narrator is telling the story. That’s when the question of reality steps in. Is this narrator real? He knows every single detail about each character in the story and yet, they’ve never spoken. Now we can discuss whether any other character in the story is real. Because the whole story is based around Jacob and his bookstore, we’ll assume that he is real. Since the narrator knows everything about Jacob, we can suppose that Jacob may be the narrator. If we think about the fact that Lila was forgotten at the end of the story, she may have been a made up character in Jacob’s mind. Jacob’s bookstore is dark and lonely. Rarely anyone goes there, and it is full of stories written by other authors. This symbolizes that Jacob’s life is very lost, and he doesn’t really have a life. All he ever had was his almost abandoned bookstore. But he never wanted to leave his store, because that was the only thing he ever knew. He was afraid to step outside of his world, and into the foreign streets of the city. The
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