The symbolism in Bassani's The Heron

Some of the symbolism in Giorgio Bassani's novel The Heron (1968, William Weaver tr.) is painfully (and intentionally) obvious, notably the eponymous heron, which the protagonist, Edgardo, encounters on the day of bird hunting that drives the narrative through line of this novel; he is w/ an assistant, who joins in the hunting, and who tells him that the heron is not a bird one could eat - would taste "fishy" - but would make a nice trophy stuffed and mounted. The assistant shoots the bird - in fact, Edgardo abstains altogether from shooing - yet, when the day is done, declines the offer of the heron carcass. So Edgardo continues on his "odyssey" with a ck full of wild ducks and the dead heron. He reflects at one point that shooting the heron would be much like shooting himself. OK, so we see that E sees himself as freakish, an outlier, wounded, and vulnerable - his marriage is breaking apart, the peasants on his property are rising up against landowners (as communism is becoming a driving force in post-war Italy - novel set in 1947), he has been forced to hide his Judaism in order to hold onto his property (transferring everything to his Xtian-born wife's name). In fact his entire hunting journey, which he sets about so reluctantly and which entails a near-comic stream of mishaps and delays, is in a sense E's "hunt" for his own identity and place in society. Other symbolic elements, however, are a little more obscure, such as E's strange physical symptoms, his constipation and his urges to defecate, the strange acidic taste he senses on his tongue, his repulsion at the oil sandwich that he brings along on the hunt, his complete inability to plan his day's diet, which at least half-way through the day, and the novel, seems to consist of nothing but coffee. Perhaps he is ill in some undisclosed manner, or perhaps these digestive issues show his repulsion at the decisions he has made in his life in order to survive and prosper - rejected his heritage, exploiting his field workers, perhaps something about his wartime activities (was he aligned w/ the Fascists?) or service.