The Tuna (Symbol)
While the tuna is in a sense a character—a being that used to be alive, with its own experience and narrative—it also functions as a symbol. This is because of its relationship with the speaker, who attributes a great deal of significance to the animal. Under the speaker's observation, the tuna becomes a symbol of worldliness and knowledge. The speaker frames the fish's underwater habitat as an exotic and unknowable place, making the tuna a mysterious, respected authority, able to traverse the otherwise untraversable boundary between sea and land. The fish's death does not lessen its status as a symbol of worldliness. Instead, in the poem's final lines, the speaker unexpectedly reframes death as yet another unknowable place. Therefore, the tuna's ability to exist in a liminal space between death and life (visible to the living, but himself dead) makes him seem to the speaker all the more admirable and knowledgeable.
Vegetables (Symbol)
If the tuna symbolically represents worldliness and an understanding of the unknown, the vegetables surrounding its body represent the opposite: mundanity, explicability, and clarity. Having moved from the sea to the land, the tuna is considered an authority on both. The vegetables, however, contrast with the fish: they originated on land and remain there. Moreover, since the speaker is a human and considers the land rather familiar and unremarkable compared to the sea, the vegetables are also familiar and unremarkable. The speaker makes this juxtaposition explicit, remarking to the fish that "Surrounded / by the earth's green froth / ... / only you / lived through / the sea's truth..." The job of the vegetables, in other words, is to be a symbolic opposite of the tuna, making the subject seem all the more interesting and strange.
