A perfect day for a banana fish

Résumé du document

A perfect day for a banana fish is a short story written by JD Salinger in 1948, it deals with one day in the life of Seymour and his wife Muriel who are staying at a hotel in Florida near the beach. Through the story, we understand that Seymour is a veteran and has lost his mind after coming back from the war. Seymour's madness worries Muriel's mother who asks her daughter to come back home. While Muriel is talking to her mother on the phone, Seymour is staying on the beach with a little girl named Sybil and tells her a story about bananafish. They happen to be ordinary fishes, but when they swim into a hole full of bananas they behave like pigs and eat so many bananas that they can't go out of the hole again. At the end of the story, Seymour finally goes back to his room and kills himself.

The end of the story is quite surprising and leaves the reader with many questions; indeed until the very end we don't expect Seymour's suicide and we keep wondering "why did he kill himself?" . To answer this question, the reader has to go through the story again looking for some hints which could explain his death, and there are actually many of them but they highlight the fact that there are many interpretations possible to explain the motives of his suicide.

Extraits

[...] The explanation of his suicide probably needs to be related to the bananafish story which could be a metaphor used to describe the post world war society. The banana fish would be the persons belonging to the society who just jump into the hole of the consumption society. At the beginning of the story, the phone conversation between Muriel and her mother let us think that Muriel became one of the bananafish stucked into a materialist world. Indeed, before calling her mother she was reading a “women's pocket size magazine” while putting “lacquer on her nails”. [...]

[...] A perfect day for a banana fish Hovv can vve explain the end of the novel? A perfect day for a banana fish is a short story written by JD Salinger in 1948, it deals with one day in the life of Seymour and his wife Muriel who are staying at a hotel in Florida near the beach. Through the story, we understand that Seymour is a veteran and has lost his mind after coming back from the war. Seymour's madness worries Muriel's mother who asks her daughter to come back home. [...]

[...] It reveals that Seymour is completely disconnected from the adult world; he may not know how to behave around adults of his age any more. An example could be given through the scene in the elevator; he is with a woman and yells at her because he thinks she's staring at his feet, he actually becomes paranoiac about that and tells her she shouldn't be god damn sneak about He seems to be more comfortable around kids whom he finds more innocent while adults appear to him meaner. [...]

[...] Another explanation could be that Seymour became a bananafish himself. His relationship with the little girl Sybil seems to me quite ambiguous. The way he behaves and talks to her may reveal some kind of attraction for this little girl. First, we can notice that he's being very tactile with her: took both of Sybil's ankles in his young man picked her up and laid her down on her stomach on the float” , He took Sybil's ankles in his hands and pressed down and forward” , picked up on of Sybil's foot and kissed the arch” and he even calls her love”. [...]