The Prom
The prom—and more specifically, the difficulty of Eric Harris to score a date for it when even his geekier friend Dylan Klebold managed to do so—is a central symbol in the book. Through the mediation of the Principal’s thoughts, the narrator describes the prom as “some weird facsimile of adulthood” and the implication is the failure to effectively negotiate the facsimile of adulthood is symbolic of something much deeper and more profoundly disturbing.
The School
The author lays out flat, unambiguous terms what the school symbolized specifically for Eric Harris. Columbine was “the symbol of his oppression: the robot factory and the hub of adolescent existence.” The point is that Columbine as a signature of something much, much more oppressive than mere bullying or failure in romance was the stimulus for his psychological explosion.
Arlene
“Eric had a bottle of Jack Daniel's in one hand and Arlene laid across his lap.” Arlene is not a girl; Arlene is the shotgun that Harris acquired on the anniversary of the JFK’s assassination, circa 1998. The weapon was named after a heroic character in one of his favorite book series, Doom. Arlene can thus be effectively said to be quite a loaded symbol; full of great significant and import stretching beyond any one particular meaning.
Fire
Fire is another complex symbol in the story. Fire is associated with Eric Harris through the metaphor “fire was beauty” because of an obsession that developed out of fear of fireworks. Fire thus has a negative connotation as the damaging spirit of compulsion. At the same time, fire is also associated with the fundamentalist evangelical movement which was strong in the area. The Trinity Christian Center is also associated with metaphor: “This is a church on fire.” Here the fire of spiritual belief is symbolized specifically in a figure of a parishioner and the negative and positive aspects of this symbol are destined to meet in a showdown when Cassie Bernall is asked by Dylan—not Eric, suggestive of the capacity of fire to spread—with a gun point to her head: “Do you believe in God?”
Trench Coats
Trench coats become the book’s central symbol for how the Columbine Massacre has been mythologized in the public consciousness at the expense of actual facts and how those myths have appropriated and exploited for the purpose of explanation that, because they are based on misinformation, have served only to draw the even further from the truth. The myth of the trench coats stems from the fact that Harris and Klebold were wearing them during the attack.
