"Critical attention so far has been focused, of course, on the "referential mania"[... ]Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. <...> He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things (595-596). Some critics argue that Nabokov[ ...]deliberately entraps the reader of "Signs and Symbols" into a sort of over-interpretation similar to the "referential mania" ...making us read the story as if everything in it were a cipher. Yet the idea of seeing a model for the reader's response in the boy's pan-semiotic approach to reality, however tempting, should be rejected from the very start for several simple reasons. First, "referential mania" is limited to natural phenomena (clouds, trees, sun flecks, pools, air, mountains) and random artifacts (glass surfaces, coats in store windows) but "excludes real people from the conspiracy," while the story deals with human beings in the urban setting and focuses upon cultural systems of communication and transportation: the underground train, the bus, the Russian-language newspaper, the photographs, the cards, the telephone, the labels on the jelly jars[...]Second, the boy's reading of the world is auto-referential and egocentric (every alleged signifier refers only to the boy himself), while the story concerns three major characters and a dozen minor ones, whether named or unnamed. Last[...] ... "referential mania," unlike the "allusions to trick-reading" in "The Vane Sisters," does not point at any applicable code, as the boy himself is unable to decipher secret messages... the description of "referential mania" can not serve as a "prompt" suggesting some way of identifying and solving a textual riddle; instead of providing a specific clue, it sets metafictional guidelines, introducing a group of semiotic motifs that refer to the structure of the text itself. If cleared of their psychiatric smoke screen, the key words in the passage form a kind of instruction for the reader to "puzzle out" an inherent "system" of the story, to look for a "veiled reference" to the boy's fate--its central "theme," to "intercept" and "decode" some "transmitted" message containing "information regarding him," to crack a "cipher" encrypted "in manual alphabet." The boy's paranoia (and, by implication, a fallacy of symbolic reading) lies not in the processes of his thought, but in their misapplication: to comprehend any sign one must first ascertain the signifying system in which it functions.

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