Short Stories for High School: Focus on Symbolism
We hope you’ve been following along the last few weeks as we share our favorite short stories to teach in high school, but if you haven’t, be sure to go back and catch our favorites for teaching plot structure, characterization, and point of view.
Today, we’re tackling symbolism. Eek! Teaching students how to find symbolism in short stories (well, in anything really) can be a real can of worms for any English teacher. On the one hand, symbols are often challenging for students to find, wrap their minds around, and explain meaningfully. On the other hand, budding literary scholars love to go “symbol hunting,” identifying anything and everything as a symbol, sometimes with wild results. Yet it’s so important that our students spend time discussing authors’ effective use of symbols because symbolism can do so much to enrich our reading experience.
Help Your Students Find Symbolism in Short Stories
One short story we included in our AP Literature curriculum every year is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” (1835). One reason we included the text is that Hawthorne made significant contributions to American literature, and we want our young literary scholars to enter college with some exposure to his work (and it’s a lot easier to get them to buy into a short story than The Scarlet Letter!).
More importantly, however, Hawthorne’s story includes multiple clear symbols that students are usually able to identify with minimal teacher guidance. This gives us a head start for class discussion, where we help them connect those symbols to Hawthorne’s thematic purposes: exploring the consequences of an obsessive focus on sin and morality (often hypocritically).
The text also allows us to provide students with a clear example of an allegory, one of those literary terms they rarely encounter and yet love to use in their practice AP essays. Without Hawthorne’s example, we’re often left to ask, “Well, have you read Animal Farm? No? Hmmm . . .” Hawthorne’s use of a network of clearly related symbols allows him to directly comment on Puritan culture in the United States’s early history. Bonus? The ambiguous ending drives students crazy and leads to engaging discussions about Hawthorne’s point.

Our second example is not one we actually taught together, but one Stephanie used recently in a tutoring session (and that is no stranger to ELA curriculums across the country): Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842). We know, we know, Edgar Allan Poe for teaching symbolism in short stories. Not a shocker, right?
This particular story works well for a lot of reasons. First and foremost, it relies upon a number of symbols that are fairly easy for students to decipher once they are comfortable with the text’s language: Poe uses color, the masked stranger, and the clock to explore themes about humans’ inability to hide from death and human selfishness in the face of suffering.
It’s also a great opportunity to require students to spend some time with a dictionary, working through the challenging language. We’ve written about the power of having students spend time looking up words they don’t know (and words they “know”) when it comes to poetry, but this is a clear example of prose in which the plot and artistry are fairly accessible once students get past the language.
It was also interesting to teach this text after living through the COVID-19 pandemic: the parallels we can draw to the wealthy prince’s decision to lock himself and his friends inside a castle, entertaining them with lavish parties while ignoring the suffering of the rest of his subjects, are eerily familiar and can lead to meaningful and relatable discussions.
Finally, for our standard-level students, we had success with symbolism in short stories using Doris Lessing’s “Through the Tunnel” (1955), which tells the story of an 11-year-old English boy vacationing with his mother in France. He becomes determined to swim through an underwater tunnel like a nearby group of older boys. This act of successfully swimming through the tunnel symbolizes growing up and transitioning to adulthood, and students can relate to the idea of a specific act that signifies that transition, whether it’s from personal or cultural experience. The symbolism is also fairly clear, making this a good choice for struggling readers who are likely to miss symbolism in more complex texts.
If you’re teaching AP Literature and looking for novels that work great for teaching symbolism, consider Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, but know your students and be aware that content warnings abound. William Shakespeare’s Macbeth also works well.
What texts do you use to teach symbolism? Where have you found symbolism in short stories students can relate to? Do you use different texts for different levels of learners? Do you have questions about how we’ve used these texts in our classroom? Reach out to us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works to continue the conversation.