The Fisher King as an Allegory
The story of the Fisher King is itself an allegory for Parry's quest to find his Holy Grail. The Fisher King was charged by God with the care of the Holy Grail, but when he lost it, he became very depressed. A simple-minded knight named Percival (who in the movie is referred to as the fool) heals the King's depression with kindness and gives the king a cup of water to drink from. The king sees that the cup is actually the Grail and asks how Percival came to find it, as he has sent his bravest and best knights to find the Grail with no success. Percival laughs and says he doesn't know, he only knew the king was thirsty.
The film is an allegory for this medieval story, with Parry and Jack alternating between playing the roles of king and fool for one another. In the beginning, Jack is the stand-in for the king, and Parry is the fool who is tasked with jolting him out of his depression and convincing him to awaken to the simpler joys of life. By the end, when Parry is in a catatonic state, Jack becomes the fool and must retrieve the Grail from the Upper East Side that will revive him. Indeed, it does, and the story of the Fisher King becomes real for these two contemporary characters. The old tale becomes an allegory for the narrative of the film, as each of the men tries to help the other free himself from what is incapacitating him.
The Red Knight Symbol
The Red Knight is a symbol of Parry's fear and it appears each time that Parry is reminded in any way about his distant past, his life as Henry Sagan, before the horrible shooting. He describes the Red Knight as his adversary in his quest to find the Grail. The Red Knight represents all of the ways that Parry is unable to handle thinking about his traumatic past, the way he has disassociated and fled from his feelings into a world of pure fantasy. In the midst of that fantasy, the Red Knight appears as an antagonistic force, a reminder that Parry has some unfinished psychological business, and a symbol of doom and depression.
Pinocchio (Motif)
Pinocchio, the wooden puppet from the famous Italian fairy tale, is mentioned early on in the film, in Jack's radio call with Edwin. He sarcastically tells Edwin that "Pinocchio is a true story," as a way of trying to communicate to Edwin that he has no chance with the girl he's trying to date. Three years later, as Jack wanders the streets of New York despondently, sipping liquor out of a paper bag and mumbling to himself, a wealthy little boy gives him a wooden Pinocchio doll, which Jack then carries around and monologues to with an exasperated urgency. By the end of the film, the Pinocchio doll is still around. We see Jack and Parry lying naked in a field in Central Park at night, with the doll between them. The doll represents Jack and Parry's psychological journey throughout the film. The way that Pinocchio, as a character, goes from being a wooden puppet to a living, breathing human mirrors the ways that Jack and Parry come back into consciousness and are transformed out of their respectively avoidant psychological states. Jack is no longer depressed and drunken, and Parry is able to face his demons head on. In this way, they are their own unique versions of Pinocchio.
Hallucinations (Motif)
Hallucinations come up many times throughout the film. Most of them are Parry's hallucinations, but Jack has one as well. Each hallucination is only visible to one person, and represents an exaggeration of their psychological state at a given moment. Jack is unable to see the Red Knight, who appears whenever Parry has to confront his feelings for his wife or whenever it seems that happiness is within reach. At the architect's apartment, Jack hallucinates the shooter, Edwin, whose violent actions Jack feels responsible for. This hallucination of Jack's represents his greatest fear and greatest psychological difficulty.
Grail (Symbol)
The Holy Grail is an important cultural symbol, as it is the last vessel out of which Jesus is said to have drunk before his crucifixion. As a result of its significance, it was a fixture of medieval legend, and many knights were said to have sought it out. In The Fisher King the "Grail" starts as a symbol of Parry's delusion—he thinks that a cup in a wealthy architect's apartment is the Grail—and by the end of the story it is a symbol of prosperity and healing, just as it was in medieval times. Jack retrieves the Grail, and even though he reads an inscription on it that confirms its phoniness, brings it to Parry in hopes that it will revive the catatonic knight. Sure enough, it magically does. After being revived, Parry is able to confront his traumatic past head-on and admit that he misses his dead wife. The Grail is a symbol for healing, moving on, and finding happiness.
