An object of symbolism I noticed in the novel Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, is the first World War. For the entire book, Howard the history teacher has been dwelling on this subject. Before Skippy's death, it was to remember Auriele, the substitute geography teacher he was in love with before she went away on a cruise with her fiancé. Now, it's to hold on to Skippy's memory, as his great-grandfather fought in the war. Howard finds it hard to let go of the past, as illustrated in this passage:
"But Guido did not live with it. Guido moved forward. He wasn't about to let one fleeting episode determine the whole trajectory of his life thereafter. For Guido the past, like a Third Word country, was merely another resource to be exploited and abandoned when the time comes; and that is why civilization is built by men like him and the Automator, and not men like Howard, who have never quite worked out which stories are disposable, and which, if any, you're actually supposed to believe." (Skippy Dies, p. 574-575)
After Skippy's death, the school's students became despondent. The school's officials had tried to sweep his death under the mat (as it was uncovered that Skippy's swim coach gave him pain killers and molested him), and the students were all trying to forget in vain. Howard is sickened by the teachers encouraging forgetting Skippy, saying that the students would not be acting up if they could just take some time to remember him. Nobody listens to this. One day, Howard feels suffocated in his classroom, and takes his entire class on a spur of the moment field trip. The minute they are outside the grasp of the school, Howard detects a noticeable change in the students.
"Still, as they hang there in the weak, cloud-filtered light, shuffling a little, waiting for him to tell them what to do, they appear different to their everyday school selves -- younger, less cynical, lighter even, as if Seabrook were a weight that they carried, and set free of it they might just float off into the air..." (Skippy Dies, p. 551)
Their surprise field trip leads them into a memorial park, built to remember the Irish soldiers who went off to fight in WW1. However, because of the tragic nature of their deaths, they were, like Skippy, deliberately forgotten. Howard is aware of the dead soldiers being symbolic of Skippy, and gives his students a great speech about remembering, and how that even when the soldiers realized the grand and heroic stories of battle were all lies, their bond of friendship remained.
"That they stayed friends, that they looked out for each other, most agreed, was what kept them from cracking up altogether. And in the end was the only thing, was the one true thing, that was genuinely worth fighting for.'
He smiles summative at the boys; they gaze mutely back at him, in their grey uniforms for all the world like an incorporeal platoon, materialized out of the winter clouds to scour the bare park for someone who has not forgotten them." (Skippy Dies, p. 557)
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