The narrator of the story in “White Ribbons” is living in New York, and she came here with so many expectations that New York would be a wonderful city, but narrator is not finding this city to be wonderful, rather she is getting bored. At one point the narrator said “This is not the way that I had imagined New York”. It shows that New York was not meeting her expectations. The story comes with so many weird details which are difficult to understand. For instance, in the world of symbolism, the white rabbits are used as gentle and tenderness, which eat vegetables. But this story is quite different from that symbolism, as white rabbits are eating meat in the opposite house of the narrator’s house. The narrator also uses various symbolisms in the story to give different meanings to different things. Like when the narrator talked about the houses in New York, she attributed them to fire by saying that “The houses, which were reddish black, looked as if they had issued mysteriously from the fire of London”. It is quite interesting that she thought of houses to be similar to the fire of London. Bu this is how authors do talk about various characters or things in their stories to come up with some symbolism (VanderMeer & VanderMeer, 2012)

            In every literature work, the author do try to introduce some kind of themes, and in weird literature, the themes can be so weird that they seem unreal. This is what the narrator has brought with this story named “The Little Dirty Girl”. She depicted the story of a dirty girl by telling so many events, but never clarified that actually who she is and where she lives etc. But keeping the weirdness of story aside it was important to look at the story for some symbolism. The narrator was certainly using various symbolisms in the story. As it is mentioned earlier that color is used as symbolism in the stories of weird kind in literature. The narrator of this story attributed colors with different meanings. Like at one point in the story, it is said that “I ever saw was a little person of five, coasting downhill in a red wagon, her cheeks pink with excitement”. The sentence from the story clearly tells that pink color has been attributed to excitement. In real world, pink color is just a color, and one can attribute it to be a color of girls. But in this story, it is attributed with the meaning of excitement by the narrator (VanderMeer & VanderMeer, 2012)

            In other story named “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles”, the narrator has talked about the story of gnloes, an evil and weird creature, and their interaction with Mortensen. Mortensen knew that it was maybe not right to make a deal of selling ropes to the gnloes, but still he went for it. In this story, the main symbolism used itself are the gnloes, who are an evil creatures, look bit like humans, but they are not humans. The gnloes had a bad reputation and everyone knew about them. The gnloes are symbol of evil then it is quite interesting to see that Mortensen went to them to sell the ropes. No one knew that what is the use of ropes for gnloes, and life was put at risk by Mortensen to go there. It was a bad decision, which proved bad in the end, because gnloes slaughtered him, and roasted him to eat with sauces. It shows that weird symbolism associated with gnloes was quite right and no one should have trusted them for anything (VanderMeer & VanderMeer, 2012)

            Looking at these tree stories, it can be said that all of them extremely weird in their outlook. Each story had so many interesting facts to talk about, which were quite weird in nature, and no one could believe in those ideas in real world. It is true that weird literature do come with weird kind of stories and facts, and it is all fiction, but still, the use of symbolism should not exceed the limits, because when it seems too unreal to read for the readers, they may not show too much interest in such weird stories. The things should be changed with their meaning, but not to an extent, where their real meanings are totally lost.

References of Body of The Use of Symbolism to Enhance the Power of Weird

VanderMeer, J., & VanderMeer, A. (2012). The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Tom Doherty Associates.