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 mother, which influences how we view the interaction between Sybil and Seymour, and we use that scene on the beach on top of our previous bias to develop our analysis of him. Even if we already thought Seymour was a little funny (whether he deserved this character trait or not) before he went back to the hotel, I don’t think any of us were truly expecting him to calmly walk up to his room and kill himself. The ending came as a shock to us because we weren’t in his or even Muriel’s head, and thus we were judging him simply from the outside. Relate this to our own experiences with people around us attempting/committing suicide, or even families who suddenly find out that a beloved family member is a serial killer. This is all just basically my drawn-out, messy way of saying that people do things that shock us because we can never form a fully accurate idea of a person, which is what I believe Salinger was trying to evoke in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”.
The other idea that I believe Salinger was touching on was the casualness of bystanders to a shocking act. I know that doesn’t really make sense, but bear with me. As we read the story, we were curious about Seymour, his past, and what he was going to do, but we were nowhere near as invested as we would have been had the story given us a look into the head of Seymour or even Muriel. So while we were sad/shocked/whatever by the ending, since we received such a matter-of-fact description void of any emotion and thought, it seemed kind of casual and didn’t really stick with us once the story was over. It reminds me of how in life when someone we distantly know dies or does something shocking, we’re appalled at first, and then we go to the funeral, talk about it, but soon forget all about it and proceed with our lives as normal.
In the interest of wrapping up, I love what Salinger did with his story and what it says about us and the people around us. He was able to capture our own flippancy and complete lack of knowledge of the people around us in one short story and I strongly admire “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” because of it.
Yeah, what Salinger does with making us an outsider (which is really how we are to other people in real life) is really interesting, and I agree that it makes Seymour's death shocking (how could we have known what was coming?), but also in a way less emotional (since we're not as attached). This is very different from O'Brien, where he wants us to feel things just as intensely and as truly as he did.
ReplyDeleteWhile I do think Seymour's suicide was impactful, I hadn't even considered that angle about Seymour's suicide being for us, as readers, much like hearing about the death of somebody you don't really know. You're right, though: we don't know what he was thinking about. We don't know much about Seymour beyond some gossip from people that know him; we hardly hear his own perspective. There's just the initial shock and then curiosity that has nowhere to build to, nothing more.
ReplyDeleteYour analogies here are really strong and make your point a lot more real. I hadn't thought of Salinger's stories as a reminder that everyone has much deeper things happening in their lives than the objective information we get at a glance, but now that I think about it I definitely agree. Especially because we never actually get in his head, in the same way that we can't ever truly empathize or understand the facebook friend/distant relative/acquaintance who does something seemingly unpredictable, and their 'unpredictable' acts likely won't have a long lasting impact on us.
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