A perfect day for bananafish symbolism series#

The abrupt, unexpected suicide is shocking and final. Seymour’s violent outburst against the woman in the hotel elevator, though, suggests that he may be deeply disturbed. The bananafish story could just be the type of thing that an adult makes up to amuse a child, except for the way the bananafish die. His behavior on the beach didn’t seem too abnormal, although wearing a terry-cloth robe on the hot beach in Florida seems a bit odd. Why did Seymour Glass kill himself? We know that he was discharged from an Army hospital, that he has been behaving strangely. Thus the story is laid out before us, and we need to solve the koan, the puzzle. He takes a Ortgies 7.65 caliber automatic from his bag, sits down on the unoccupied bed, and shoots himself through the right temple. Seymour lets himself into the hotel room, which smells of “new calfskin luggage and nail-lacquer remover.” Muriel is sleeping on one of the twin beds. He says “If you want to look at my feet, say so … But don’t be a God-damned sneak about it.” On the elevator ride up to his room, he accuses a woman passenger of looking at his feet. Sybil runs off down the beach, and Seymour goes back to the hotel. Seymour kisses the bottom of her foot, and then pushes the raft and Sybil back to shore. Sybil then says she sees a bananafish with six bananas in its mouth. “ Seymour explains that after they eat so many bananas, they can’t get out of the hole. Why, I’ve known some bananafish to swim into a banana hole and eat as many as seventy-eight bananas. But once they get in, they behave like pigs. They’re very ordinary-looking fish when they swim in. Seymour tells Sybil about bananafish: “they swim into a hole where there’s a lot of bananas. Seymour has an inflatable raft, and when the water gets up to Sybil’s waist, he put her on the raft, on her stomach. Then Seymour and Sybil go into the water. Having her hair dyed mink.” The two have a discussion about Sharon Lipschutz, another little girl who Seymour had let sit on the piano bench while he played in the Ocean Room at the hotel. Seymour replies that Muriel is “At the hairdresser’s. Seymour Glass is revealed to be a pale young man wearing a terry cloth robe and lying on the beach.

Sybil runs down the beach to find “see more glass”. The mother lets Sybil run off and play while she heads up to the hotel to have a cocktail with a friend. A young child named Sybil Carpenter is on the beach with her mother. The action of the story then moves to the beach. Muriel tells her mother that she tried to talk with a psychiatrist who is staying at the hotel about Seymour’s problems. We hear allusions to a car accident, to odd behavior towards Muriel’s family, and we also learn that Seymour was in an army hospital before coming home. In the conversation, we learn that Seymour has been behaving rather strangely since he returned from the war. We learn that Muriel is basically a shallow, self-absorbed woman who does her nails and glances through a woman’s magazine while waiting for her call to her mother to go through. Muriel, Seymour’s wife, is talking to her mother on the phone. “Bananafish” opens in a hotel in Florida in 1948. Salinger at this point in his life was a student of Zen Buddhism, and “Bananafish” is similar to a Zen koan, or riddle, in which a question is posed and the answer is found through meditation and self-examination.

A perfect day for bananafish symbolism series#

Using mostly dialog to set the scene and give background on the main characters, Salinger presents the barest of facts, describes a series of events, and then lets the reader puzzle out the meaning and fill in his or her own perception of the characters. The “Bananafish” story (which became the opening story in Salinger’s beloved collection Nine Stories ) is a masterpiece of economy and style. Nevertheless, the spirit of Seymour pervades all of the stories, and is a constant presence in the thoughts of his younger brothers and sisters. In all the other stories he is either referred to, or described from a distance in time. “Bananafish” is the only story in which Seymour appears in real time. Salinger would go on to chronicle the lives of the Glass family siblings in a series of short stories and novellas. Third, it marks the first published appearance of Seymour Glass, the oldest sibling in the Glass family. The magazine offered Salinger a right of first refusal contract, and he subsequently published his new work almost exclusively in the New Yorker. Second, it established a working relationship between the author and The New Yorker. First, it brought Salinger serious critical acclaim. This event was a major step in his literary career.

Salinger published the short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” in the New Yorker.