Coconut Trees
The coconut trees on the island which is the setting of the story are surprisingly robust symbols. What they are intended to represent is no mystery, as they are described metaphorically as things which are “as fanciful as women, and as vain.”
The Schooner
Even the man who actually owns the schooner which Red now captains recognizes that his vessel has just about reached the end of its usefulness after long years in service. It is described as “bedraggled…dirty, dingy and mottled” as well as smelling bad, handling even more badly, and posing a threat to life and limb should conditions become too severe. This description of the schooner comes long before its fat, balding skipper is revealed as the young man once compared to a Greek god and so becomes not just symbolic of the ravaging effects of aging, but foreshadowing of those effects as well.
Red and Sally
Red and Sally are complex symbols representing a variety of different aspects of human existence. Most directly, their respective alterations in physical beauty come to symbolize the overzealous importance that people place upon physical attractiveness. The fact that the massive alterations in their appearance lead to them not even recognizing each twenty-five years after supposedly falling head over heels for each other situate them as symbols of another massive failure of human perspective: love is just as fleeting as beauty. Even their names are symbolic since neither is known by their actual given name, but rather are referred to by nicknames invented for them. This, combined with the fact that everything we learn about that romance is second-hand “hearsay” conveyed by Neilson serves to underline their fairy tale romance as being an invented fiction.
Coconut Tree Bridge
The coconut trees really do have a robust symbolic element within this story. The specific symbolism of the bridge constructed of planks of single coconut tree trunks lashed together has less to do with their representation of the vanity and fancy of women as with the passage of time. The questionable solidity of the bridge sends out the signal that to cross requires “sure feet and a stout heart.” The aged, portly skipper is described in crossing the bridge using terms like “carefully” and “gingerly” to describe the quality of sureness in his own footsteps. This marks Red’s first return to the island where he fell in love with Sally as a young man and the difficult in making it across the bridge situates it as the symbolic centerpiece of the passage of time. Red’s return as the unrecognizable old skipper transforms the coconut tree planks into a bridge crossing time as well as space.
Neilson
Maugham’s most famous works are defined in part by a philosophical inhabitant of its cast of characters. In many, though far from all, the protagonist is a man (never a woman) invested with a sense of optimism and hope that his search for the answer to the meaning of his existence (only his because they are all self-centered) will be answered. Characters in novels like Larry Darrell in The Razor’s Edge and the obsessive Gauguin-like painter in The Moon and Sixpence are sometimes juxtaposed with characters in short stories like Neilson who represent the exact opposite. Neilson is the prototypical example of Maugham’s less popular cast of nihilists who not only reject searching for any meaning in life, but have arrived comfortably at the conclusion that such meaning cannot possibly be found anyway since it assuredly does not exist.
