The fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne is often heavy with symbolism and symbolic meaning, with that meaning carried by objects, words, and character and place names that convey the ideas Hawthorne wants to implant in the reader or that make the reader think as Hawthorne wants. Such symbols often work on the reader unconsciously, evoking meaning and memory based on associations the reader has with the words used or even the sounds of the words. In the short story "Roger Malvin's Burial," for instance, the sound of the name "Malvin" creates a certain sense of evil foreboding, conveyed by the beginning "mal," a phoneme meaning bad or prone to evil. For that matter, the name "Roger" means "spiritman," making the character appears as an evil spirit in the form of a man.

             The tone is also set by metaphors and similes. The men "stretched their limbs the night before" and lie on a "bed of withered oak-leaves" (para. 2), with their limbs becoming one with the leaves and the limbs of the tree above them so that they are truly a part of the landscape. They are part of the landscape as well as their bed is on "the summit of one of the gentle swells, by which the face of the country is there diversified" (para. 2). Above them is a granite rock like a "gigantic grave-stone" (para. 2), another symbolic element in the opening scene. Certain words used in the opening may also show symbolic meaning. Some symbolic meaning may be fanciful, as when readers deermine that because the story takes place in 1725, this is significant because 17 means conquest and 25 the square of 50 with humans having 5 senses. In fact, the story is set in 1725 because it is based on a historical fact, when Jonathan Frye planted two saplings in front of his parents' home and then left with Captain John Lovewell to fight Indians. Frye did not survive the expedition. The Hawthorne story is based on the Frye experience (Dickerson, 2001, paras.