Hooking in on the symbolism thing, I must say it always annoyed me when teachers urged us to find all the symbolism the author put into their novel. Like with T.S. Eliot, we had this annotated version of The Wasteland, where the only words not accompanied by footnotes were 'the' and 'and', and everyone made it out like Eliot had put all of those references and symbolisms in consciously.

I always thought that was bullshit. Yes, there would be a lot he'd put in on purpose. But the longer we as a species develop our cultures, the smaller the world becomes in terms of culture references becoming available to other cultures, the more our history develops - the more symbolism we are going to find in art, regardless of how much the author put into it consciously.

Accidental symbolism is much more amazing, imo, than insisting authors know every cultural reference ever, and always put everything they know into everything they write.