A Perfect Day for Bananafish (Themes)

Themes

Alienation

Almost everything (and everyone) in Seymour's world is tainted by shallowness, vanity, or violence. The most obvious example of this state of affairs is the war, which destroyed a part of Seymour that he is only able to recognize in the two children he befriends at the hotel. Muriel is almost completely self-absorbed: all of her actions in the story's opening paragraph have to do with her appearance (moving a button, cleaning a skirt, polishing her nails, washing her comb and brush, tweezing a mole); when asked by Seymour to read the poems of Rainer Marie Rilke, she mocks Seymour's enthusiasm and instead flips through a brainless article titled "Sex Is Fun — or Hell." (Presumably she has to be told the answer to this riddle.) Despite Seymour's past indications that his mind was collapsing, she brushes aside her mother's concern because this is "the first vacation" she has had "in years." Her coat is of equal concern to her as her husband's troubled mind, and the reader is invited to believe that she let Seymour drive to Florida not out of any great faith in him but because she is not the kind of girl who would drive herself (as the reader is told, she is "a girl for who a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing").

Despite the fact that he married her, there is nothing in the story to suggest that Seymour can make any kind of real contact with his new wife: Salinger never puts them in the same scene until the very end, when Seymour (significantly) does not wake her up before killing himself. The characters with whom Seymour does connect, however, are Sybil and Sharon. Sybil's mother reminds the reader of Muriel, for she, too, is more concerned with herself than in protecting her daughter. Seymour can only speak to Sybil because of her innocence and freedom from what he sees as the corruption and phoniness of the world. (This is why Seymour resents the woman in the elevator lying about looking at his feet: a child would simply look at someone's feet without any unease or desire to hide the fact.) After his conversation with Sybil (from which she runs "without regret," leaving the scene without any compunction or need to engage in the kind of false manners that marks the conversation of Muriel and her mother), Seymour quite possibly realizes that such innocence and freedom from the hypocrisy of adulthood has vanished from his own life — which leads to his decision to forsake that life, in favor of a better one elsewhere.

Suicide

Like The Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield, Seymour Glass is a person whose essential innocence marks him as unfit for the world in which he finds himself; while Holden retreats into bouts of near-insanity before his final emotional collapse, Seymour takes much more drastic (and final) action. Why, exactly, he takes such drastic action is the central question of the story.

One reason (discussed above) could be that Seymour feels such despair at the thought of his own fall from innocence (a fall made more apparent by his activities in the war) that he kills himself to prevent his soul from becoming more tainted. Seen in this light, Seymour's troubles are a magnification of those felt by millions of veterans who return from any war with the images of its horrors still fresh in their minds. Another possibility is the obverse: Seymour (like the bananafish) has glutted himself with too much sensory pleasure and feels such self-disgust that he commits suicide out of shame after speaking to Sybil. He does not want to become like the self-consumed Muriel, so he kills himself to prevent this from happening. (Of course, if the bananafish story is applied in this way to Seymour, one realizes that it is the nature of bananafish to eat too many bananas, just as Seymour feels it is the nature of humans to glut themselves with sensory pleasure.) A third possibility is that Seymour is, at heart, a child — but a child who (unlike Sybil) demands attention from his loved ones, to the point where his suicide is something like a temper tantrum at the injustices of the adult world. (This accords with his outburst in the elevator, his last spoken words to another person.) However, Salinger's leaving the meaning of Seymour's suicide open to such wide avenues of interpretation suggests the ultimate impossibility of fully fathoming the mind of any person who willingly destroys him or herself. (Such fathoming is what Buddy Glass, Seymour's younger brother, attempts to do in Salinger's later fiction.)