The Symbolic Potential of Snakes in Two Short Stories: Ivo Andric's “Snake” and Vladimir Nazor's “Snake”
The Symbolic Potential of Snakes in Two Short Stories: Ivo Andric's “Snake” and Vladimir Nazor's “Snake”

Summary/Abstract: The oral tradition of the South Slavic cultural space is full of examples of the coexistence and intermingling of animals and man. The snake is one of the most common folkloric motifs not only in Slavic mythology and oral literature, but is also to be found in ancient, biblical, Indian, Jewish and many other mythologies and literatures. Christianity has only retained the negative connotations of the snake: the snake embodies Satan and caused Eve to sin. For psychoanalysis, the snake embodies the inferior psyche, dark psychism,which is incomprehensible and mysterious. This paper explores the symbolic and archetypal potential of snakes in two literary texts: Nazor's short story “The Snake” (published in 1927 in the short story collection Stories from the Island, the City and the Mountain) and Andric's short story“ The Snake” (from the short story collection Children, published in 1967). The analysis will show that Nazor and Andric not only share the same title for the short story, but they are both well aware of the symbolic and semantic potential of their animal protagonist, the snake, and of the Western canon symbolism of the snake: evil.

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