Las Vegas
Las Vegas is the overarching symbol for the book. The essential symbolic quality which Vegas represents is self-illusion. Most concretely, the self-illusion that pervades every aspect of Sin City is juxtaposed to the self-illusion associated with plans to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain for the next 10,000 years despite the fact that even that number is an arbitrary illusion since nobody really knows for sure how long such waste can be kept until it no longer presents a serious threat to the surrounding environment and population.
Levi Presley
Presley, the young man who throws himself to his death from atop a Vegas high-rise, is the symbolic personification of suicide. The extraordinarily high rate of suicide in Vegas—consistently among the highest if not always the highest in the country—represents another aspect of Vegas as the city of illusion. Not just because of all the illusory quality of the city’s casinos, but also because the city seems to work so hard to deny its existence as one of the suicide capitals of the world. The illusion of the city is constructed upon an illusion that everybody who comes there leaves happily and that illusion is personified in the figure of Presley.
Yucca Mountain
Yucca Mountain is a complex and complicated symbol in the text. On the one hand it represents the viability of study as the means of education; the mountain is one of the most intensely studied natural phenomena in the country. On the other hand, despite everything that has been learned about it, what man really needs to learn most as this moment in history is the one thing that remains most elusive: how will the mountain actually respond to becoming a repository for nuclear waste?
Munch's "The Scream"
The famous Expressionist painting by Edvard Munch becomes a symbol for a recurring motif that is pervasive throughout the text. Screaming is situated as the means by which man cries out for help; in this case, help against the toxicity of the natural world. The otherworldly colored sky in the painting is widely believed to have resulted from the Krakatoa volcanic eruption and therefore what is beautiful to most is situated as horrifying to the screaming star of the painting. Those screams against the encroaching danger of not fully understanding how the natural world works is a major theme of the book and so Munch’s painting symbolizes that theme most concretely.
Language
Over a short period of this short text, the author successfully situates language as a symbolic entity capable of making even the most comprehensive study and foolproof execution of science meaningless in the face of disaster. Just as the nuclear material being planned for long-term storage in the nearby mountain will inevitably conclude a process of degradation making it eventually harmless, so does language degrade over time. Even allowing that the 10,000 year estimate is enough time for the degradation of nuclear waste to run its course, imagine how much the language spoken today will have degraded over that same period. Who can say for sure that in 5,000 years civilization will understanding the language warning them to stay away from the mountain, much less than in 5,000 years any significant degradation to the material stored there will even have occurred.
Motif of Solitude
The book's central theme is isolation, which is embodied by the vastness of the desert and the loneliness that comes with it. One is prompted to consider existential and personal ties to oneself and the wider world by this solitude.
