The lawyer will most likely have a long life, but the quality of fifteen years of it is absolutely horrible. Those years are enough to ruin the rest of his life, since all the learning he does while alone convinces him that mankind is evil.

             In more cases then not, it is the reader, not the characters, who learns something from the story with the help of symbols. In "Shaving," the author, Leslie Norris, spends a long time describing things such as the razor and the shaving bowl with good reason. The razor is a phallic symbol of Barry's father, who previously was able to take care of his family without much help. Now his son shaves him with that razor. Since Barry shaves him, it is a sort of passing of responsibilities on to Barry, because his father knows he will not be in this world much longer. This shows the readers that responsibility is important to being an adult. When the author describes the shaving bowl, he spends a long time on the cracks, or weak points that have appeared on it and how it is a remnant of Barry's father's juvenility. To him, those memories just happened yesterday. At the end of the story, Barry opens the bathroom window and sees that ".the window was in the beam of the dying sunlight.knowing that it would soon be gone." (123). The sun represents Barry"s childhood, because the sun is starting to set at only two o"clock in the afternoon, and Barry is not yet seventeen and will soon be head of the household. The reader can draw from this the conclusion that youth is fleeting, which Barry only recently discovers.

             In "A White Heron," by Sarah Orne Jewett, the main character Sylvia is represented by several symbols. The first that comes along in the story is a dried geranium. Before Sylvia moves to the country with her grandmother, she lives in a manufacturing town. It is crowded, and dirty, and not very pleasant, causing Sylvia to be somewhat timid, unhappy, and confused as to what she wants.