Substitution operates in stories at two levels at least: the characters, in attempting to reach certain goals, put up tokens to guide themselves or to fool others; the narrator, to retard the action or to put the reader or listener off the track, puts up tokens as well.

     The token is not usually an exact replica of that which it represents, but a "rough equivalent." A stone is not a parent; it does not look like, weigh as much as, act or think as a parent might. But a stone can serve as a token of a parent, as those who visit graveyards know.

     In "Little Red Riding Hood," the wolf dresses himself to look like the grandmother. He substitutes certain attributes of the grandmother for his own; he wears her clothing, he lies in her bed. At the level of character, the wolf is doing the substituting. But on that other level, the wolf may be no more than an alternate form of that "lure" and "corruption" associated with the bedroom. At this level, the grandmother is another face of this "crime."

     In "Hansel and Gretel," all of the characters play the game of substitution. Hansel uses pebbles and crusts to simulate parental or divine guidance. He uses a bone to simulate a finger. The father and mother give crusts in place of bread enough to live on, a brush fire in place of a log fire. The witch advances a pleasing, reassuring lie in place of a frightening truth. But the narrator is not immune to the game. Watch what valuables go into Hansel's famous pocket, and note the similarity and dissimilarity of function. Examine the various fires that make a difference, including the pale fire of the moon, and bright fire of the sun. And then observe the substitutions of one character for another, of step-mother for mother, of witch for step-mother, of Hansel for Gretel, or of Hansel for God.

     Whether the substitution is seen as a task for a character or for the narrator, it usually involves a selection of just a few attributes of the absent or "substituted for" object. In other words, the task is to identify certain parts of the whole that will adequately represent the whole, just as a painter chooses just those elements that will count in creating a recognizable two-dimensional image of a tbree-dimensional human model. Such a substitution is called a "metonymy" or a "synecdoche." The part is never the same as the whole; it is in a sense an "empty" version of the whole, or a weaker version at best, a "pale imitation," like the moon.

     All such substitutions need to be evaluated on both the level of the character and that of the narrator.