In kabbalistic literature, the use of symbols is stylized, and the various images serve almost as mathematical formulae.
In the Tales of Rabbi Nachman they become creatures of flesh and blood with human qualities and failings.
Not only do the king, the queen, and the king‟s daughter appear in the tales in their clear kabbalistic meaning, but they are balanced by a meticulous attention to even the minutest details of the story.
Nachman himself rightly pointed out that in this sense his stories are precise not only in their broad allegorical structure but also in their finest details.
His literary work is not impressionistic but precise, similar to a Breughel painting, where even the seemingly trivial or scarcely seen detail is portrayed as exactly as the central figures themselves
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz