A Perfect Day for Bananafish (1948). Content and Description

The first of Salinger’s critically acclaimed Nine Stories (1953), “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” was originally published in the New Yorker on January 31, 1948. Perhaps his most famous short story, and, together with “For Esme—with Love and Squalor” (1950), his most frequently praised, it is often cited as a model of the short fiction genre.

Set in post-World War II America, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” depicts a failing marriage. Little more than a common surname unites Muriel and Seymour Glass. The depth of their separation and the contrast between their worldviews are reflected in the narrative: They neither interact nor share the same physical space until the story’s final paragraph. Nearly all the action transpires in two scenes. The first is set in a beachfront hotel room, where sunburned Muriel converses with her mother on the telephone.

They talk mostly about Seymour: his discharge from the military, his release from a mental facility, and his erratic behavior. Growing impatient with her mother’s anxiety concerning Seymour’s perceived instability, Muriel ends the conversation abruptly. The second scene is roughly contemporaneous with the first and is set on the beach just outside the hotel. Here, Seymour meets four-year- old Sybil Carpenter, with whom he shares a pleasant dialogue, goes for a swim, and relates a tale about the fabled “bananafish.” In the brief final scene, Seymour returns to his room, glances at Muriel, and shoots himself with his military-issue pistol.

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” laments the shallow, materialistic culture Salinger associates with the modern world, particularly mid-20th century America. Typical of his postwar work, this story is devastating and pessimistic, presenting a protagonist burdened with posttraumatic stress disorder and severed from the shallow, materialistic world his wife inhabits. Muriel, though patient with her husband’s eccentricities, inhabits a cultural wasteland where meaning and happiness are found in “women’s magazines” and the latest fashions.

The bananafish allegory captures Salinger’s vision of modernity. Yellow has long symbolized cowardice; its association with gold also evokes imagery of wealth. With their explosion in U.S. popularity in the 1930s and 1940s, bananas have often been associated with hedonism and materialistic excess. The bananafish, however, is illusory, a fabrication with no material reality. When Sybil claims to see one, she reveals not only her own neophyte material ambitions but also the vapid nature of these ambitions. By not disabusing Sybil of her fantasy, Seymour bears a resemblance to Holden Caulfield, who, at the end of The Catcher in the Rye, admits he cannot protect Phoebe from a “phony” world.

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” set off two important phases in Salinger’s career. It is the first in the Nine Stories cycle. It is also the first story in the Glass family saga. Later in his career Salinger grew obsessed with Seymour and his siblings, using them as a vehicle to flesh out his own growing commitment to Vedanta Hinduism. From 1955 to 1965, when Salinger ceased releasing his work to the public, Salinger’s only publications treated the Glass family. Though he would not return to Seymour for several years, no character proved more fascinating to his creator.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. The epigraph to T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land, reads, “With my own eyes I saw the Sybil of Cumae hanging in a bottle; and when the boys said to her: ‘Sybil, what do you want?’ she replied, ‘I want to die.’” Some critics have conjectured that Sybil Carpenter is named after the Sybil of Cumae, an ancient pagan priestess with remarkable powers of foresight. Like The Waste Land, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is set just after a world war and captures the disillusionment that followed. Read Eliot’s poem and compare his vision with Salinger’s. Is one more optimistic than the other? Why would Salinger name a four-year-old after an ancient seer of death?

2. Many critics have suggested that Salinger changed his outlook between the publication of Nine Stories and that of his later works. Despite this, Seymour Glass remained on Salinger’s mind, growing into something of an obsession toward the end of the author’s publishing career. After reading at least one other Seymour narrative (“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” “Seymour: An Introduction,” “Hapworth 16, 1924”), compare the characterization of Seymour in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” with that found in a later story. Is he the same character, or is Salinger’s characterization inconsistent? Does he change? If so, how? Write a well-developed essay that examines Salinger’s development through his characterizations of Seymour.