“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” appeared in the New Yorker in 1948 and was later republished as the opening story in the collection Nine Stories(1953). In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Salinger introduces the Glass family, who would become recurring characters in his fiction. In the next ten years, Salinger published three other Glass family stories in the New Yorker: “Franny,” “Zooey,” and “Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters.” These stories appear in Salinger’s other books, which include Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). Critics revered Nine Stories, but Salinger’s other works were not so well received. The siblings of the Glass family were criticized for being unkind and obnoxious.
Salinger’s first novel, Catcher in the Rye (1951), was the critical and popular success that launched Salinger into both literary fame and social scandal. Catcher quickly became an American classic, and its protagonist, Holden Caulfield, became the voice of a generation that was coming of age in the postwar era. After the popular success and controversy of Catcherand the criticism of his subsequent works, Salinger isolated himself from the world, publishing little and maintaining a private life.
Salinger wrote “Bananafish” in postwar America, when many veterans of World War II were struggling with the readjustment to civilian life. The story includes many of the elements that Salinger revisits throughout his career, including the idea of the outsider, male angst, critique of New York society, contempt for materialism, and the redemptive nature of children. Seymour Glass, like many of Salinger’s other protagonists, is an unhappy outsider, critiquing the society of which he is part. Salinger’s heroes are most like him in this regard—outsiders who are dissatisfied with society and therefore remove themselves from it by either self-seclusion (like Salinger himself) or suicide.
Muriel Glass waits in her Florida hotel room for the operator to put her call through to her mother. The hotel is full for a sales convention, so she must wait a long time. She fixes her clothing, paints her nails, and reads a magazine. When the call does go through, Muriel reassures her anxious mother about her safety. Her mother is concerned about the erratic, reckless behavior of Seymour, Muriel’s husband. She hints at a car accident that Seymour and Muriel were involved in and suggests that Seymour deliberately crashed Muriel’s father’s car into a tree. She reminds Muriel of the strange and rude things Seymour has said to members of Muriel’s family. Seymour has recently returned from the war, and Muriel’s mother believes that he was discharged from the military hospital prematurely. Muriel is not as concerned as her mother. She is preoccupied by the fashion at the resort and the evening’s events. In the evenings, there are formal dinners and cocktail parties, at which Seymour often sits apart, playing the piano. The resort is full of society people, although Muriel feels that the quality of these people has diminished since the war. She tells her mother that Seymour is on the beach by himself.
Throughout “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” characters struggle to communicate with one another, and each attempt is fraught with difficulty. Muriel and her mother engage in a haphazard conversation in which Muriel never really hears her mother’s worries and Muriel’s mother never really hears Muriel’s reassurances that she is fine. The two women talk at rather than with each other, and neither woman succeeds in truly communicating her thoughts to the other. When Muriel attempts to talk with the psychiatrist at the resort, their communication is hindered by the noise around them. Seymour is entirely unable to communicate with other people at the resort, preferring to sit alone playing the piano or spend time at the beach rather than try to enter into a society in which he feels like an outsider. Sybil’s mother fails to communicate with Sybil clearly, believing that Sybil says “see more glass” when she is actually talking about Seymour Glass. Only Sybil and Seymour seem able to communicate effectively, although their discourse is on a child’s, not an adult’s, level.
Though Muriel and Seymour do not speak with each other in the story, their communication is so fraught as to be nonexistent. Muriel has no idea what is really going on in Seymour’s mind, and Seymour seemingly has no desire to explain to her how he feels. The most tragic lack of communication is Muriel’s mistaken certainty that Seymour’s mental health is fine. Seymour’s violent suicide is, perhaps, the one truly successful act of adult communication in the story, the one gesture that cannot be misread or ignored.
The idea of seeing permeates “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Seymour’s name sounds like “see more,” a confusion that Sybil’s mother falls prey to when Sybil talks to her about “see more glass.” Sybil’s name also references seeing; in Greek mythology, a sibyl was a seer. Seymour, or “see more,” suggests that Seymour is literally able to see more than other people. Because of his traumatic experiences in the war, he has a greater understanding of life and can recognize the materialism and superficiality of the world around him. Like Seymour, Sybil can see what others cannot, though her openness is a function of her childishness rather than of trauma and regret. She easily sees the imaginary banana fish that Seymour tells her about and is therefore able to “see” Seymour in a way the adults in his life cannot.
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