The Toy Sword
The wooden sword is symbolic of how the child has been taught an immature view of war by his father as the fantasy of the warrior-myth. At one point, the child believes he is actually a general leading the troops into battle, thus cementing the sword’s toy quality as symbolic of the immature nature of warfare.
The Rabbit
The fact that of all the things that the boy sees, the one thing which genuine terrorizes him is a rabbit endows the benevolent little furry creature with a symbolism that belies its inoffensiveness. The rabbit becomes the parallel to the all horrific images which the boy should find frightening but doesn’t. Why? Because he’s been taught that war is fantasy; a game to be played and not feared. His reaction to the rabbit, contrast, indicates he has been taught nothing about a creature; his ignorance is a natural reaction.
The Deafness of the Child
The inability of the child to hear the sounds of war as a battle rages all around him—because of this he can actually sleep peacefully throughout the entire nighttime battle—is laden with the symbolism of adults and their failure to heed the calls for peace and understanding and diplomacy and just plain intelligence that could make wars avoidable.
The Muteness of the Child
The child’s inability to talk or in any way articulate a coherent response when he finally recognizes the reality of the horrors of war takes on the symbolic charge of everyone—whether soldier or innocent victim—who has been victimized by the less than glorious realities of war and either has had their voice silenced or has been rendered psychologically incapable of relating the full extent of that horror.
The Boy's Home
Every image associated with war is seen through the provocative lens of the boy’s world of fantasy until he realizes that he has made his way home. And then, suddenly and irrevocably, everything comes into the focus of reality. And this sudden change is charged with some of the most profound symbolism of the story as he is not just snapped into real world, but he is “stupefied by the power of the revelation.” This is a moment of Biblical intensity for the child; it is the moment, in fact, when—at last—his fantasy world is shattered and reality is revealed to him in the most profoundly moving way possible: he now is capable of making the correct emotional response to what he sees. He has, in other words, finally attained the maturity of the reader. And what exactly was the stimulus for his no longer responding to the world in an inappropriate manner? Like the boy himself, the war has come home to him. In symbolic terms, this is the effect of glorifying war in the abstract and then finally having one’s eyes opened when a mortar destroys their home and kills their loved one. For some, such a nightmarish display of reality will ever be enough to snap them out of their fantasy world view of the glory of the warrior myth.
The Mother
The mother is barely recognizable as a human as the result of the damage inflicted by an enemy’s shell. The description also suggests quite strongly—with her dead hands gripping at the grass around her and her clothes being “deranged”—that she has been sexually violated. What is left is an image of absolute, total and wholesale devastation: a perfect symbol of any conquered enemy in which it is not just the soldiers who must ultimately pay the price of losing a war.
