Upon Second Glance

Before we started reading J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories, Mr. Mitchell’s specific instructions were to read the first story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, twice. Now, I wouldn’t consider myself a consistent rule breaker, but on the night that this reading was assigned, I was feeling particularly rebellious/ lazy. So, I decided that reading the story only one time through would suffice, and if I got confused, I would read through it again. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. So, after reading the story, I felt like I had a good idea on what it was about: A rebellious daughter phoning her worried mother, telling her that everything is all right. A sketchy man lying on the beach with a robe wrapped around him, waiting for a little girl to approach. The man was obviously a predator or some sort by the way he talks and acts around the little girl. The man then proceeds to kill himself, possibly a little disgusted with the way he acts and feels around the little girl, and how he may not feel the same around his own wife. It seemed like some pretty straight forward material, dark, but straight forward. Well boy was I wrong.

Now, as mentioned before, I had only read the story once that night, (Sorry, Mr. Mitchell), believing that I really had a clear idea on what the story was about. But, once I got to school and began discussing the story’s content with some of my fellow classmates, I found that some people didn’t have the same interpretation as I did. Some people were even suggesting that this man, Seymour, wasn’t a predator and that he was just being playful with the child, Sybil. Needless to say, I came to the conclusion that the story deserved a second read before it came time for class discussion.

Now, after having read the story twice and discussed it in class, I honestly can’t make up my mind with what’s going on. So, I’ve devised two theories that put forth the mindsets that I came out with when reading the story, mostly regarding Seymour as a character. (Before I dive into this,  I just want to say that I think it’s pretty incredible that J.D. Salinger wrote a story in which two or more vastly different conclusions can be made. Quite controversially clever, Salinger). So, here’s the first one:

This theory is similar to the one that I stated earlier upon my first read, only a little more fleshed out. In this theory, I thought about the reasons behind Seymour’s suicide at the end of the chapter. (Before I go into this, I want to state that I know there is no way to pinpoint the direct reasoning behind someone taking his or her own life. That sort of action is very complicated and cannot be reasoned by anyone except for the one doing it). In class, the question was posed that if Murial and Seymour are so happy together, then why does Seymour seek a friendship with Sybil and shoot himself in the end. When first reading the story, I thought that Seymour was a pedophile of some sort (or he has some fetishism towards children), and that he knew it. He loves his wife, but not in the way that she loves him, because he can’t. He seems to feel more comfortable and able to interact with Sybil and other children her age. Knowing this, Seymour may have felt sad and lonely because he can’t be in a happy relationship with his own wife because he just doesn’t have that same attraction to her as she does to him, and he can’t seem to confide with anyone this kind of information, for fear of being judged. This is evident in the scene where he shoots himself in which he “glanced at the girl lying asleep on one of the twin beds” (18).  After this, he grabs the gun, looks at his wife one more time, and then pulls the trigger. I read those two glances as looks of remorse. Seymour felt sorry that his wife endeared so much backlash for waiting for him and he can’t live up to what she may want of him. In this theory, Seymour knows that his fetishism is wrong, and so to act on in and make life easier for those around him, he shoots himself.

OR

After taking a second look and discussing the story in class, I devised a completely different theory. Being sent to the war deeply affected Seymour. Being surrounded by violence made him want to revert back to the periods of his life where he was an innocent young child. Unable to go there physically, his mind took him there mentally. That is why Seymour acts to playfully with Sybil because he understands her and her thought processes. He prefers being in this fantasy world where bananafish are real and the trees are a mysterious place to play hide and seek in, unlike the world of fashion that Murial and her mother seem to be so obsessed with. We see this in the way Seymour interacts with children and how it is vastly different from how he interacts with adults. When riding the elevator back up to his room, Seymour yells at this adult woman for seemingly staring at his feet, even though she was possibly just staring at the ground instead. Needless to say, that didn’t matter in Seymour’s eyes, for he still yelled at her, to which she promptly asked to get off the lift. In the end, Seymour may have ended his life because he realized that he just doesn’t fit in the world around him. He has the mind of a child that is trapped in the body of an adult. Because of this, some consider him mentally unstable and a danger to society. In a way, his actions can be seen as dedicated to others: He took his own life so others wouldn’t have to worry about him. The whole story is painted lightly but has some very dark undertones of sadness, depression, and loneliness.

All in all, although I’m leaning more towards my second theory, I can’t find myself fully on one side or the other. Every time I read Seymour’s conversation with Sybil, I don’t get a full sense that he’s just being playful with her. (This may be because I have just watched way too many Law and Order: SVU episodes). In the end, I think Salinger’s goal was the give us a glimpse of a complex character that appears in some of his other works as well, and I believe that he did that very successfully.