As many have already stated in their blog posts, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by J.D. Salinger takes a narrative approach that is far different from the collection of short stories by Tim O’Brien that we focused on for a couple weeks, and I’d like to give my personal take on the narrative voice and what it does for the story. I found Salinger’s decision to be a reflection of life. Every single person is complicated and messed up, albeit on a very far-reaching spectrum of messed-up-ness. The thing is, we all know to some degree what’s going on in our own heads and how we ourselves are messed up, but there are so many people that we interact with on a daily basis who we will never truly understand. Instead, we rely on snippets of information gathered from observing a person and listening to what others have to say about them to create a vastly fractured idea of this person. Just like how in Salinger’s story we have a rough idea of Seymour after the phone call between Muriel and her