Opening Line
The novel opens with a line that introduces its status as a symbolist novel. Which is to say that characterization is subjugated to symbolic meaning. That opening line is actually—symbolically speaking—the entire narrative which follows in miniature:
“Fog was so dense, bird that had been disturbed went flat into a balustrade and slowly fell, dead, at her feet.”
The key symbol here is the bird which gets so lost and confused in the fog that it becomes “disturbed” and in a manner of speaking kills itself. That describes pretty much every character in the story except for the killing themselves part, but that is the direction their stories all head.
Fog
The fog in the story is literal. It is reference, described or mentioned at least fifty times over the course of the novel easily. The fog is also symbolic and that is what makes it ambiguous. The fog is literally so thick that it causes traffic jams which means that it covers the entirety of England. The symbolic fog is confined to just those inside the London station hotel. When the literal fog finally lifts there is no such concordance with the symbolic fog under which these shallow socialites live. After an entire novel’s worth of conversation filled with inanities and exhibitions of superficiality, they are no different at the end than at the beginning. These people live in the fog and will continue to do until their disturbed nature symbolically causes them to crash into a balustrade.
The Station Hotel
Steel shutters are being put over the entrance when the characters arrive as a defense against an unwieldy crowd looking to escape the fog. Literally speaking, that is. One of the characters will later make an observation that points to the real symbolic reason:
“it is all so locked up that not a soul can get in or out.”
The description of souls being locked up indicates the hotel is a symbolic purgatory of sorts.
Artichokes
The four or five mentions of artichokes—which might have been bamboo—is a symbol for special memories. Specifically, a symbol for the kind of memories that are shared with extreme prejudice and which may become confused in the details, but retain their singularly distinctive quality.
Party Going
The ironic thing about the novel Party Going is that it features neither a party nor the act of going to a party. The purgatory these characters find themselves is not really the station hotel, but anywhere they may be when there is no party going on. Without a party they have no consequence and their lives are aimless and meaningless. Unfortunately, when there is a party they have no consequence and their lives are aimless and meaningless. Since there is no party and the novel stops at the point that they actually begin going to the party, the title becomes a symbol of this meaningless since it has no consequential relationship to the events which actually take place in the story.
