Just as characterization and dialogue and plot work on the surface to move the story along, symbolism works under the surface to tie the story's external action to the theme. Early in the development of the fictional narrative, symbolism was often produced through allegory, giving the literal event and its allegorical counterpart a one-to-one correspondence. Symbolism in literature was a complex movement that deliberately extends the redolent power of words to express the feelings, sensations and states of mind that lie beyond everyday awareness. The open-ended symbols created by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) brought the invisible into being through the visible, and linked the invisible through other sensory perceptions, notably smell and sound.
Take the example of a very famous novel "A Farewell to Arms" uses nature to structure the novel and provide symbols that replace human emotions. Nature serves as a basic structure for the plot and the actions that occur. It also emerges as a source of symbols that replace human sentiment or feelings. The most important of these symbols is that of rain.
Rain represents death and all the accompanying emotions of grief, pain, and despair. Death is both brought by rain and can be considered analogous to it. Catherine is the first person to make this analogy explicit when she tells Henry that she is afraid of the rain. "I am afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it" (p. 126). Although Henry dismisses her words at the time, they continue to haunt the novel up until she dies. Indeed, immediately after Henry visits her dead body in the hospital, the novel ends with the passage: "I...walked back to the hotel in the rain" (p. 332). The novel thus ends with rain being used as a substitute for Catherine's death.
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