When literary symbols fail, it is most often in this difficult and essential mutuality. In a typical example, we begin the story in the room of a dying woman alone with her collection of perfume bottles. The story ranges back over her rich and sensuous life, and at the end we focus on an empty perfume bottle. It is meant to move us at her death, but it does not. Yet the fault is not in the perfume bottle. Presumably a perfume bottle may express mortality as well as a hat may express racial equality. The fault is in the use of the symbol, which has not been integrated into the texture of the story. As Bonnie Friedman puts it in Writing Past Dark, “Before a thing can be a symbol it must be a thing. It must do its job as a thing in the world before and during and after you have projected your meaning all over it.”

Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction, Tenth Edit…, loc. 644