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.
Well, I have to admit it isn’t hard to be smarter than me...
Readers should not need to know the author’s biography - was this available to readers when he wrote the novel? It is valid to consider the context of the period and culture in which the author lived, but if you have to know the author’s biography just to understand his writing, then the novel is drivel. The novel should be complete by itself.
Likewise, readers shouldn’t get to decide about the symbols - either the symbols mean something - or they don’t. Symbols are simply a method of compacting additional meaning in fewer words (a literary equivalent to an acronym?); if the symbols are ambiguous and can mean different things to different readers, then they have NO meaning (if they mean multiple things, then the author is being too darn clever for his own good...). Ambiguity means the writer is not telling the story effectively and his writing is just so much egotism “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”