Personally, I think most “symbolism” in literature is made-up garbage to torture students and make a book seem deeper than it really is. For instance, a lot of people try to find “symbolism” in Dickens and miss the fact that he was getting paid by the word...
I am just glad I missed Catcher in the Rye, Moby Dick, and Gatsby. Give me Heinlein, PC Wren, and John Buchan, any day.
I’m not attempting to be smarter than you, or convert you to my way of thinking, but what you say is what was said by most high school students to me over the years. Fair enough, I say, let’s look at the symbols and see if they make sense. Each reader must decide. You explore the writer’s autobiography for clues, his upbringing, his outlook, his influences, the times he lived in, his other writings, his thesis, his reason for writing the book. If the symbols begin to show a pattern in light of much of the foregoing, a case can be made. I don’t expect to have students accept something because I say so; I try to convince them in terms of logic. But more importantly, I try to get them to be careful readers, to open doors to possibilities. Great literature is a storehouse of treasures, and I want to make them aware that perhaps many nuggets of great wealth lie hidden, and it takes time and critical thinking to uncover them. And the discovery must be their own.
You are half-right, I think, in that they don’t completely make it up. It’s just that books which are fruitful of symbols—like Moby Dick—or books which are incomprehensible to casual readers—like Ulysses—tend to get assigned more often. Less manipulatable books are forgotten.
That thing about Dickens being ‘paid by the word’ is a canard and not true. He was paid by the installment.