![]() ![]() The monologue is twice interrupted by mistaken telephone calls from an anxious girl looking for someone called Charlie the second time the mother explains to the girl that she had been dialing the letter O instead of zero. Unable to sleep at night, the father declares that they must remove the boy from the sanitarium: the doctor can come to see him at home, and they will take turns watching him at night. They take the gift back home so that it does not get mislaid in the office. Yet on reaching his sanitarium they are told that he tried to commit suicide that morning and should not be disturbed. This is their son's twentieth birthday the boy is incurably deranged, and it is with great care that they have chosen an inoffensive gift for him, a basket of fruit jellies. The story describes a Friday afternoon and night of an elderly Jewish immigrant couple in an American city. "Signs and Symbols" was first published in 1948 in The New Yorker and later collected in Nabokov's Dozen. ![]()
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