A symbol may be defined as something which is itself and yet stands for or suggests something else. As one of the common thetorical figures of speech, the proper use of it will enrich the language of a literary text, especially poetry. With the adject ...

A symbol may be defined as something which is itself and yet stands for or suggests something else. As one of the common thetorical figures of speech, the proper use of it will enrich the language of a literary text, especially poetry. With the adjectival form of the word "symbolic", we may expand and modify its decorative function to mean all language motives and narrative strategies involving a textual imagination. Thus, poems like Blake's "The Sick Rose" are totally symbolic, and Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the Mississippi in Twain's Huckleberry Finn are very symbolic. The symbolic relates itself to a quality of imagination that runs counter to the realistic, the reportorial, the analytic, and the programmatic. The Grapes of Wrath (1939), the subject of this study, is usually considered to be a realistic or even naturalistic novel by the author who was midly sympathetic with the proletarian cause in the thirties. Quite a few people who read the book at the time of its publication are even known to have believed it factual authenticity. Steinbeck's biography also testifies to his dependence on truthful material he had gathered in writing the exodus of the famished "Okies." On the level of fiction-making imagination, however, he is far more symbolic than realistic. Evidence includes the opening allegoric anecdote about a land turtle, the symbolically charged action of Rose of Sharon sho feeds a starving stranger at the end of the book, the behaviors of main characters and the qualities of their yearnings, the biblical and other allusions including the Exodus, and so on. The symbolic dimension of the book may have created in some people an impression of political or esthetc inadequacy. More properly, however, it has its redeeming quality: Steinbeck's symbolic imagination restores him back to the American democratic tradition of Walt Whitman and others.