#7: Ambiguity is crucial to absorbing literature the way Foster wants us to. Humans are hard-wired to think only at the surface level. Unlike eating or sleeping, analyzing literature for symbolism is not essential to our survival and is an unnatural skill to learn. However, once learned, being open to new ways of thinking will help a reader to notice more symbolism in a given text. The journey of becoming a scholarly reader itself involves ambiguity, as you are implementing reading and processing strategies that are foreign in the majority of academic courses.
Another reason ambiguity is important to have is because writers use ambiguity when writing scholarly texts. No writer has ever written a final draft on the first try. Instead, they welcome all ideas that present themselves, and chose the ones that work best in the story.
In the book, Foster relentlessly asserts that essentially everything in a story from descriptions of the weather to a walk to the grocery store contains symbolism. Only with a combination of ambiguity from both the author and the reader can the author deliver his or her deeper message to the reader, hidden within ordinary events. Possessing ambiguity is almost like a secret password into a club of people who know the true, underlying meaning of a text.
It was reassuring to read what you said about analyzing literature for symbolism being unnatural and not necessary for survival. When you put it like that, I don't feel so bad about not understanding or picking up on things hidden between the lines. After reading what Foster has to say about symbolism I have begun to pick up on more symbolism than I would have in the past. Even watching movies has turned into something more for me than simply just seeing the screen and not really digesting what is going on. Something that really hit home for me in that sense was when Foster mentioned the sexual symbolism in Hollywood and how sex can be portrayed or hinted towards with symbolism. He talks about how young viewers would basically take certain symbols at face value, while adults and older viewers are capable of picking up them. His specific example was in a 1941 film titled The Maltese Falcon, where two people are kissing by a window and the following scene directly jumps to the next morning with just the window curtains blowing in the wind. Although there was no sex explicitly shown on screen, the curtains were what alluded to it.
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