Short Girl, Short Stories

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...

The other day in class, we were discussing Tim’s lies and what they meant to us. Mr. Mitchell and some other students seemed incredibly frustrated by the fact that the biggest things, including the man Tim “killed” and Norman Bowker, were lies. Others believed that, in a work of fiction, we shouldn’t be surprised when the author gives us a little fiction, and thus didn’t understand why everyone was all up in arms about Tim lying. The last group of students, the one that I belong to, weren’t incredibly bothered by the majority of Tim’s lies but found his invention of Kathleen to be his most betraying and despicable lie, despite the fact that it’s arguably his most insignificant. Since credibility is such a discussed topic in this collection, I decided that for my blog post I’d give my own opinion, as well as an argument for why the lie about Kathleen was so frustrating. All of Tim’s big lies seem to suit some larger meaning. Inventing Norman Bowker gave him the opportunity to de...