3ENm-eng/MOE 2001-2002

Salinger: A Perfect Day For Bananafish - see important points and aspects after the questions

Salinger: A Perfect Day for Bananafish
B-essay
In your essay you should include some of the following issues, but not necessarily in this order:

1) the girl (the young bride) and her relationship to  a) her mother
                                                                              b) Seymour

2) Seymour Glass and his relationship to the world: a) his wife
                                                                              b) his in-laws
                                                                              c) Sybil
                                                                              d) his doings (as told by his wife and by Salinger)

3) the German poetry (what is Seymour’s point in asking his wife to study German?)
 
4) the story of the bananafish

5) the theme

6) the title

You should always concentrate on and include:

a) the theme
b) the title
c) the actions of the main character(s) which will lead you to a characterization
d) important lines that reveal something important such as the author’s message
e) symbols

In the case of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” you should speculate on the meaning of the story – the theme + the writer's message – before you start writing.  What’s the significance of the bananafish?  There is no such thing as a bananafish – it is obviously a symbol; your task is to find out of what it is a symbol.  Don’t start writing your essay before you feel you know the answer to that question.  When you feel you are ready, you will also know the answer as far as the theme is concerned as the two are usually linked together.

Don’t dismiss the young woman too lightly.  Imagine what it must have been like for a man like Seymour to have been married to her (NB we only know about him indirectly through his wife’s conversation with her mother, but that should supply you with sufficient clues).  Therefore you need to characterize the girl.  You may also want to include the kind of social circles his in-laws represent.

On the basis of your characterization of this upper-class life (and how you imagine Seymour reacted to their lifestyle), you will probably want to compare his relationship to his wife and in-laws with the way he talks to the little girl.  She is also the one he tells the symbolic story of the bananafish.

How does the story of “Little Black Sambo” fit into all of this? Can you explain the six tigers?  Don’t despair if you can’t as you may already have enough to write about.  I just mention these as examples of the things you need to have thought through before writing.
 

Notes

1. Seymour Glass (note the connotations to his name) has had a dreadful mental experience fighting the Germans during his time as a soldier in World War II in Europe,  which has caused him to look at himself and his previous life with contempt. He has thus become alienated from his fiancée (now wife - honeymoon/new luggage), who is ignorant of the world as such and especially of the historic cultural values of Germany and Germans, who in the minds of the average American were thought of as barbaric "Huns".

2.  Nobody understands Seymour, especially not the little girl he confides in with his tale of the "Bananafish", but we get to know about him and the reasons for his suicide through the parable (a moral story) of the fish who can't escape through the hole back to reality/the old world once they have eaten bananas (= killed Germans).

3. His despair is contrasted through the ignorant and casual behaviour of his in-laws and everybody else he meets. He doesn't belong anymore and feels disgust at their way of life. He is the one who has changed, but that doesn't make him less alienated. However, he doesn't know how to tell the world about his feelings and condition (how can a sick person do that?); but he does try to express himself through his "playing" and driving, perhaps hoping that somebody will notice this cry for help. But not even the psychiatrist at the hotel is able to interpret this as a desparate action. Maybe, Seymour doesn't want to be "helped" (which might mean electro shock treatment = killing the guilty part of his brain). Maybe he feels that he deserves "punishment" for what he has done. The fact that he asks his wife to study German to read German poetry may indicate that he now admires his former enemy for what the enemy deserves and loathes himself because of his uncivilized actions.

4. Maybe that's why he covers up his white (=untanned) body: he doesn't want to be exposed to "life" - not the life of wealthy American tourists in Florida, at any rate. The scars he has are mental scars, not to be seen with the eye, but he feels they are real, as are his feet. He seems to be obsessed with his hands and feet, the limbs that carry out orders from his brain.

5.  In a sense, he  may be the only sane person on this planet and everybody else sick.  His reaction to the terrible things a war does to people is, in fact, rational. Only an emotionally handicapped and crude person would not react to the strains put on soldiers' minds when in combat.

6. He doesn't care about his life anymore (or the life of anybody else, it seems) as he drives in a deliberate dangerous fashion. Therefore he can't feel too affectionately for his wife; he must consider her a "spiritual tramp" (= vagabond), a woman with no sense of belonging, married to him, but like her mother still living in her old world of no cares.

7. The message of the story is of course the cruelty of war and what it does to people, but also, I think, the ways we deal with people who have reacted spontaneously in a sound way to the cruelties of life, especially war. We don't regard ourselves crude and ignorant beasts just because we don't suffer from a nervous break-down after having participated in a war. But maybe we should?. Maybe we should regard war as the ultimate "evil" and try to avoid it in every possible way. We might start by not believing in the propaganda portraying the "enemy" as a beast. Hitler was a beast, yes, but not every German. But the Germans should not have allowed Hitler to make the Jews scapegoats in the first place. However, before going into the Second World War the American soldiers were told that their Asian adversaries, the Japanese soldiers, were close to having white children for breakfast, there was no end to their uncivilized behaviour.  Even though some of the Japanese soldiers were cruel, so were many American soldiers; and after the war it has been difficult to erase the effects of the propaganda from the minds of Americans. The enemy has got to be inferior, otherwise we can't persuade people to rally against him. But we  may be able to stop future wars if we don't follow our leaders blindly and adopt a more detailed view of things.

May 2002
Erik Moldrup