![]() Salinger, James Lundquist quotes the Zen koanthat Salinger uses as an epigraph for Nine Stories (“We know the sound of two hands clapping. Other critics shy away from clear-cut solutions and instead focus on the ways in which the story dramatizes Zen and Buddhist thought, a different manner of thinking than that to which a Western reader is accustomed. Salinger: A Critical Essay, Kenneth Hamilton even contends that Seymour kills himself for Muriel’s sake and that his suicide is “his way of allowing the true Muriel to escape from the banana hole where she has become trapped through her attitude to marriage.” To Hamilton, Seymour “dies physically in order that she may again live spiritually” - a strained conclusion, perhaps, but one that illustrates the degree to which critics will try to wrestle a solution from the story. Similarly, in Bernice and Sanford Goldstein’s appraisal, “Zen and Nine Stories” (also collected in Bloom’s Modern Critical Views), Seymour is described as “the enlightened man rejected by the non-enlightened world,” a world he flees through his suicide. ![]() ![]() Salinger, Revisited) writes that Seymour is not upset with “the insufficiently appreciative Muriel” as much as with himself for “succumbing to materialistic temptations.” Like Wiegand, Warren French (in his book J. Salinger), William Wiegand attempts to “solve” the riddle of Seymour’s death when he argues that Seymour is “a bananafish himself,” who has “become so glutted with sensation that he cannot swim out into society again.” Wiegand further argues that Seymour’s suicide is not the fault of any other character (such as Muriel), but that “the bananafish diagnosis” applies to many of Salinger’s characters. Salinger: Seventy – Eight Bananas” (collected in Harold Bloom’s 1987 collection Modern Critical Views: J. There are almost as many opinions about why Seymour kills himself as there are readers of the story, which is why a combination of praise and puzzlement is found in many critical appraisals. Or perhaps he’s just another fish trapped in the hole Perhaps Seymour escapes, through his wisdom or his madness (or both). Intriguingly, Salinger closes his story with a similar focus on objects – only now the object in question is “an Ortgies caliber 7.65 automatic.” The society of commodities turns back on itself the bananas kill the fish. When the operator finally rang her room, she was sitting on the window seat and had almost finished putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand.” She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs in her mole. She took the spot out of the skirt of her beige suit. She read an article in a women’s pocket-size magazine, called ‘Sex is Fun – Or Hell.’ She washed her comb and brush. “There were ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel She used the time, though. You see sequins – everything.” Seymour, by contrast, can’t even get the color of Sybil’s bathing suit right.Ĭonsider also the paragraph that opens the story, and its insistent emphasis on such aspects of postwar America as advertising, women’s magazines, fashion, and cosmetics: Muriel at one point refers to “that awful dinner dress”, and later discusses “the clothes of this year” with her mother: “Terrible,” Muriel calls them. Returning to the notion of the bananafish as metaphor for the fatally consumptive American, it is significant that Salinger devotes the entire first half of his story to Muriel’s conversation with her mother – a conversation in which materialism repeatedly rears its head. The late 40’s were in large part a period of reaction to World War II, as exhibited in the burgeoning school of film noir, the influx of apocalyptic B-movies, and new waves in philosophy and literary theory. ![]() To a modern reader, it is easy to miss what to 40’s readers was the story’s principal and disturbing undercurrent: post-traumatic stress disorder. It was published in The New Yorker in 1948, and few short stories in the history of American letters have met with such immediate acclaim. ![]()
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