Symbols: Sun and Fire
The sun, fire, and light imagery (e.g., the burning orphanage, the sun at the end, the lamp, the lit pipe) represents destruction, enlightenment, energy, joy, illumination of truth, rebirth, and purification. They are associated with Apollonian truth and purity, but also with Dionysian energy and destruction.
Symbol: Pipe
The pipe that Osvald is smoking when he first enters the scene is his father's pipe, and is thus a symbol of that man. Captain Alving forced Osvald to smoke it when he was a child, symbolically transforming (or rather, completing the transformation of) Osvald into himself. Mrs. Alving didn't like it then and she doesn't like it now, revealing her antipathy toward her late husband. The pipe, some critics theorize, may also have been Ibsen's intended vehicle by which the father transferred syphilis to the son, again confirming the object's symbolic function as the "sins of the father."
Symbol: The Orphanage
The orphanage is the symbol of the ghosts, the lies, and the repressions Mrs. Alving has carried with her or perpetrated as she tried to expunge her husband from her life and consciousness. It is a perverted symbol, though, for it contains elements of Engstrand's devilishness and Manders's hypocrisy. It is mirrored by the brothel Engstrand wants to start of nearly the same name, and it never could have functioned as Mrs. Alving wanted it to. When it burns down, it destroys her hopes and sets in motion enlightenment and destruction in her and her son.
