Symbolism In How To Read Literature Like A Professor

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Symbolism is simply everywhere. When determining the symbolism in the media, literature and your everyday life, you must use imagination, instincts and past experiences. Foster’s book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, readers learn that yes in fact everything can be a symbol, the question is what does it mean, what does it stand for? Several symbols can be the representation of themes from the animalistic changes of humans to the importance of friendship. In Benioff’s City of Thieves, the eggs, weather and the German knife symbolize the brutality of the war and the growth of Lev throughout the novel. An essential in every American household, fragile eggs don’t belong in a brutal war. Eggs are found everywhere, always in supply in your…show more content…
Throughout the whole book, the weather is treacherous and is the most dangerous element for Lev and Kolya too. The question is, whether or not the cold is a curse or a blessing for the Russians; for Lev and Kolya’s task it is more of a curse. First of all, the bleak weather conditions made food impossible to eat. Living in Russia people had to be creative and find different ways to make food. For instance Lev describes the library candy, “The boy sold what people called library candy, made from tearing the covers off of books, peeling off the binding glue, boiling it down, and reforming it into bars you could wrap in paper. The stuff tasted like wax, but there was protein in the glue, protein kept you alive, and the city's books were disappearing like the pigeons,” (52). The cold itself is responsible for most of the deaths in the war. Think about the fact that if the weather wasn’t so bad, Ruslans chickens would’ve never died, and our heroes wouldn’t have had to go on such a long journey, “Couple of eggs a day, that and the rations would do us. But we couldn’t keep them warm enough,”(84). The cold in the book helps emphasize how almost impossible it was to survive in the war and made the book more

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