Salinger’s story is similarly full of elliptical statements and exchanges (‘elliptical’ meaning that parts of the meaning are left out, leaving us to deduce the full meaning for ourselves).īut how sibylline is Sibyl? Salinger’s child-characters are often the wisest, while the adults are too corrupted by the weight of the world and the realities of day-to-day living to be in touch with the true meaning of life. Indeed, the one character in ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ who seems to understand Seymour is the child, Sybil, whose very name summons the prophetesses of Greek mythology who made elliptical, but wise, pronouncements by scattering fragments of their prophecies which those who consulted them had to piece together themselves to discover their (potential) meanings. It is not that the adult males in either story wish to objectify the girls: indeed, the point is that the men are themselves children, who have retreated back into childhood to avoid the unbearable strain of adult life. Both male protagonists can only truly relate to women – or rather, girls – who are much younger than they are, and who are, indeed, still children. The alienation of the war-scarred male character is not the only thing which unites these two stories: Seymour’s playful conversation (indeed, borderline flirtation) with Sybil recalls Krebs’ relationship with his younger sister (where he talks to her as though they are courting boyfriend and girlfriend rather than sisters). Ernest Hemingway’s 1925 story ‘ Soldier’s Home’, in which a young man named Harold Krebs returns from fighting in the First World War and can no longer relate to the people in his hometown in Oklahoma. With this in mind, we might also compare ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ with another post-war story, albeit one that is, like Mrs Dalloway, about the aftermath of the First World War rather than the second. But it is Sybil for whom he takes off his robe, partly, perhaps, because such an act has none of the adult connotations it carries with his wife (with whom he is expected to perform his marital duties) and is instead a regression to childhood. He is evidently scarred by his war experiences. He also refuses to take his bathrobe off because he doesn’t want anyone to see his tattoo – even though, according to Muriel, he doesn’t have a tattoo. It is clear that Muriel’s mother is concerned for her daughter’s safety when in the company of her husband, and it’s also clear that Seymour has been acting erratically and even dangerously (such as crashing his father-in-law’s car). (Oddly enough, Seymour’s statement about Sharon Lipschutz, ‘mixing memory and desire’, is an allusion to another post-WWI modernist work which features shell-shocked soldiers: T. Seymour Glass is Salinger’s own version of Septimus Smith, Woolf’s shell-shocked First World War veteran whose patient wife Lucrezia feels powerless to help her troubled husband, much as Muriel feels unable (though willing) to help Seymour. ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ has been compared to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: another post-war fiction which focuses (in one of its plotlines or character arcs) on a soldier who has recently returned from the war and who struggles to adjust to post-war life.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |