A Perfect Day for Bananafish

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A Perfect Day for Bananafish (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

J. D. Salinger’s America is a loveless place that provides little opportunity for romantic or spiritual achievement. Seymour Glass is a poetic saint caught in a stifling marriage to Muriel, whom he has dubbed “Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948.” Their honeymoon only emphasizes their separateness and the impossibility of real intimacy between them: While an unfeeling Muriel concerns herself with drying her nails and gabbing on the phone with her mother about her new husband’s questionable sanity, Seymour roams the beach. There he meets and courts the affection of a little girl, Sybil Carpenter, whose innocence and natural sympathy for his loneliness both please him (he plants a kiss on her ankle) and force him to weigh a child’s warmth against the bleakness of the adult responsibilities that face him.

The story’s title refers to a tale which Seymour relates to Sybil about mythical fish that presumably swim into holes deep in the ocean floor where bananas are hidden; once there, the bananafish gorge themselves until they are too fat to escape the holes, thereby sealing their doom. Likewise, Seymour is a victim of gluttony: He is so vulnerable to sensation, so overwhelmed by the mysteries of his universe, that he cannot return to society again--especially not as that society is defined by the small-minded concerns of his wife and his mother-in-law.

The shocking end to the story exemplifies what dedicated readers of Salinger have come to appreciate as the intricate relationship between humor and misfortune. On one page, we are laughing at Seymour’s caustic encounter with a woman in the hotel elevator, and on the next we are confronted with his calmly methodical suicide, Seymour’s “banana fever.” Seymour is but one of Salinger’s perceptive, feeling heroes surrounded by people who limit themselves to artificial gestures and shallow desires. It is a perfect day to purge himself of participation in such company.

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