The letters symbolize Great Aunt Mary’s repressed emotions. The letters initially center on the physical loss of connection between Aunt Mary and her soldier while the latter is at war, but their focus slowly shifts to emotional distance—not between Mary and John so much as within each character. The trauma of war has a numbing effect that John describes explicitly: “I have lost all sense of feeling. […] I have no pity or sorrow for the dead and injured. I thank God it is not me but I am enraged that it had to be them” (31). Although John’s conversion suggests that he works through these feelings to some extent—he seems content in his decision to become a monk—Mary undergoes a parallel trauma but never processes it. Her decision to store the letters in her bureau’s interior space represents how she compartmentalizes these troubling feelings of sadness, loss, and anger.

For the protagonist, the letters come to symbolize his guilt over having pried into his aunt’s secrets. When his mother burns them, it symbolically releases him from this guilt (or at least allows him to begin to heal), allowing him to cry “for the first time since [Mary] died” (33).