We live in an age in which 'the conscious and deliberate use of symbolism defines much of our art as the criticism of the past decade amply bears witness' according to Pickering and Hoeper. Literary symbolism or symbolism is not exactly the same thing with the generally known 'symbol'. The adjective "literary" suggests that the symbolism concerned about is the one connected with literature or literary works. Therefore, in discussing literature, the term symbols is applied only to a word or phrase that signifies an object or event which in its turn signifies something or include references beyond itself.

According to Meyer 'a literary symbol can include traditional, conventional or public meaning, but it may also be established internally by the total context of the work in which it appears'. To make it more comprehensible, it will be pertinent to say that a literary symbol can be setting, character, action, object, name or anything else in a work that maintains its literary significance while suggesting other meaning. This simply means that symbols cannot be restricted to a single meaning, because they are usually suggestive rather than definitive

What Meyer has succinctly taught is that literary symbols are circumscribed in the text alone, and do not have a single meaning for they are suggestive of other meanings. Therefore, unlike Sociology, Political Science and Religious Studies which have a signifier-signified conception of symbol, the signifier- symbol pointing to the signified object in the real world, in literary studies one may have an intra- textual view of the symbol.

It is also evident that "literary symbols tend not to be one - track, one dimensional signal that simply say "danger" or evil lurks here". That is because a serpent may symbolize danger. It may symbolize guile (the snake in the gross). It may stand for alien or otherness (since reptiles represent a very different life from our own mammalian existence). It may represent danger that has a strange paradoxical attraction or beauty'.

Johnson asserts that 'another way of making the distinction is to define a literary symbol as being first of all an object (a thing or place) which is represented so that it seems real; and, second, an object which embodies special significance as the result of the way it acts upon or is acted upon by other objects, and especially the characters, in a story, a poem, or a play'. In his effort at further explanations, Johnson posits that 'the two crucial ideas in this definition are reality and relationship: the symbol takes on more than literal significance by being what it literally is and by being related to other things.