Summary of Signs and Symbols by Vladimir Nabokov

In Signs and Symbols by Vladimir Nabokav, he is portraying the couples son, as a victim archetype. First he wants no desires like most people. Secondly, he comes from a lower class family.Thirdly, has mental problems. Finally, trys to end his life many times to escape the real world. Some instances were as follows:
" For the fourth time in as many years they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present tdo bring a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind. He had no desires."(659).

" A nurse they knew, and did not care for, appeared at last and brightly explained that he had again attempted to take his life."(660)

"The last time he had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor's words, a masterpiece of inventiveness; he would have succeeded had not an envious fellow patient thought he was learning to fly- and stopped him. What he really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape." (660)

"She wore cheap black dresses." (659)
" Her husband, who in the old country had been a fairly successful businessman, was now was wholly dependent on his brother Isaac, a real American of almost forty years standing."(660)

"Four years old, in the park: moodily,shyly, with puckered forehead, looking away from a eagerly squirrel as he would from any other stranger."(661)
" Age six- that was when he drew wonderful birds with human hands feet, and suffered from insomnia like a grown- up man."(661)

His parents saw a bird under a tree and symbolized it as being their son and the way he is having to live right now.An instance would be," A few feet away, under a swaying and dripping tree, a tiny half-dead unfledged bird was helplessly twitching in the puddle."( 660).