A Perfect Day for Bananafish (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: J. D. Salinger
- First Published: 1948
- Type of Plot: Psychological
- Time of Work: 1948
- Setting: South Florida
- Principal Characters: Seymour Glass, Muriel Glass, Muriel's mother, Dr. Rieser, Sybil Carpenter, Mrs. Carpenter
- Genres: Psychological fiction, Short fiction
- Subjects: Suicide, Mental illness, Veterans, Greed, Materialism
- Locales: Florida
The Story
“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is composed of three interconnected story lines, the first and third of them realistic, the second a kind of fantasy. As the story opens, Muriel Glass is alone in her hotel room, presumably in Miami Beach, waiting for her call to her mother to be put through. She is polishing her fingernails when the telephone rings, but she does not drop everything to answer it. She replaces the cap of her nail polish, gets an ash tray, sits down on one of the twin beds, and answers the telephone on the fifth or sixth ring.
Muriel's mother,...
[The entire page is 1529 words long]
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