Burning Candle Symbol Analysis

Though the characters in Doctor Zhivago are tied together by the grand power of history, they are also connected to each other by a more mysterious kind of destiny, even coincidence, symbolized by a burning candle. The symbol of the candle first appears when Lara attempts to confess her past relationship with Komarovsky to Pasha, and Yuri observes the candle in the window as he passes by. Though Yuri has seen Lara once before, after her mother’s attempted suicide, this moment links their fates together more closely than he can possibly know. The image of the burning candle continues to obsess Yuri and appear in his poetry as his destiny and Lara’s become more and more intertwined. Destiny, for Yuri, is something humans can recognize but never truly understand. Though Yuri and Lara eventually make the connection regarding the candle on that cold winter night, the rest of his life—and the lives of the characters around him—continues to reveal and be radically changed by the most unthinkable coincidences, from his encounter with Pamphil Palykh to the reappearance of Vasya Brykin. Indeed, the candle connects Yuri to the one other character with whom his fate is mostly closely connected, who was also present that night: Lara’s husband Pasha Antipov, or Strelnikov. During the evening Yuri and Strelnikov spend together, they burn candle after candle, manically continuing their conversation to avoid sleep. Strelnikov understands only too well, however, the mysterious and unescapable nature of destiny, and he dies suicide upon reaching some sense of closure from his and Yuri’s fateful reunion.