What do these things in "Most Dangerous Game" symbolize?What do the jungle, the island, the darkness, and the color red mean in the story, and what...

Richard Connell's suspenseful and suprising short story
"The Most Dangerous Game" is, indeed, replete with symbolism.  Ironically, the jaguar
about which Sanger Rainsford speaks so superciliously becomes a symbol of Rainsford
himself as he, too, is hunted as "game" and becomes what he calls "an animal at bay" in
the game of hunting man. 

When Rainsford falls overboard
into the "blood-warm water of the Caribbean Sea," he must swim through the darkness of
his ignorance and unawareness of the Darwinian world which he will enter on the island. 
This island, called Ship-Trap, has what Rainsford's companion Whitney calls "an evil
name among searfaring men."  In fact, Whitney asks Rainsford if he does not feel
anything as evil is tangible, the sailors say.

After
Rainsford is taken captive by Ivan and then released for General Zaroff to hunt, he
becomes a beast of prey in the dangerous, Darwinian jungle where only the smarter and
stronger survive.  It is in the jungle that the "most dangerous game" is played, and
Sanger Rainsford learns "the full meaning of terror."  Indeed, this jungle is the
testing ground of Rainsford and Zaroff where Rainsford learns "how an animal at bay
feels."  With its Death Swamp, it is where life is a continual red/bloody struggle in a
dangerous wilderness with quicksand, rocky cliffs, fallen trees, mud and sand, and wild
seas.

Finally, after he escapes from Zaroff and Ivan in the
jungle by diving into the sea, and then appears in Zaroff's bedroom, Rainsford tells
Zaroff "I am still a beast at bay," as he points a sword at the general.  Rainsford wins
the dangerous game of survival of the fittest and feels victorious: "He had never slept
in a better bed Rainsford decided."