the latter two points to be among the story's "signs and symbols". With his paragraphing, the story's sections have 7, 4, and 19 paragraphs, indicating the year it takes place, 1947. (Drescher credits this connection to Anthony Stadlen.) In the New Yorker version, the last section had 18 paragraphs. To support his claim that the connection to 1947 is intentional, Drescher notes that in Nabokov's novel Pnin (1957), Pnin complains that a librarian has changed volume 19 to volume 18 and gotten the wrong year in his request for a book from 1947, saying, "They can't read, these women! The year was plainly inscribed." Regarding "beech", Drescher argues that it is the husband's misreading of the label, "an example of typographical free indirect discourse," and is one of the story's many references to the Holocaust, specifically the Buchenwald concentration camp. Buchenwald means "beech woods", and Pnin thinks of "Buchenwald" and "beechwood" (for cremation) together. Interpretations In a letter to Katharine White, Nabokov said that "Signs and Symbols", like "The Vane Sisters", was a story "wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one." He did not say what the main story was. Some critics have argued that the story's many details can be deciphered into a message—for instance that the son has committed suicide, or that he is in an afterlife and free from his torments, or that the third phone call is from him, saying that he has escaped from the asylum. However, the predominant interpretation is that the story inveigles the reader into an attempt at deciphering the details and thus "over-reading", which is "another, milder form of referential mania". See also Apophenia References External links Full text as originally published in The New Yorker Short stories by Vladimir Nabokov Works originally published in The New Yorker 1946 short stories Short stories set in New York City Doubleday (publisher) books