Red Chair

The red chair in the hospital television room symbolizes innocence. The first time the narrator meets the little girl, he notices that she has been coloring the chair, believing that it wanted to be red instead of its original color. The author uses the chair as a means of challenging the narrator's steeled emotional center.

The Woman in the Grey Sweater

The woman in the grey sweater symbolizes death. Though she is not death incarnate, the woman's character encapsulates death's inevitability and indiscriminating nature. She haunts the pages of the story, and the narrator's life, thus illustrating death's simultaneous omnipresence and inescapability. Indeed, though she works for death, she has no control over who is taken.

Black Pencil

The black pencil the woman in the grey sweater uses to cross names off her list symbolizes fate. The narrator first sees the pencil shortly after his...