A Few Pages Of Purely Salinger - Nine Stories

9 Pages 2132 Words

Day for Bananafish” is the point at which the mystified reader turns back to page one in order to re-read the story for the first time. Why did Seymour Glass kill himself? On a beach vacation with the Carpenter family, Seymour and Sybil, the pre-teen daughter of the Carpenter’s, spent time playing in the sand and water together while Muriel, Seymour’s wife, was having a telephone conversation with her mother in the hotel room. After some fun in the sun, Seymour and Sybil part and Seymour returns to his hotel room only to fire a bullet through his head, abruptly ending the story with the sentence that opens this paragraph.
On a second read, the imaginations, passions, and self-will that govern the lives of the characters surrounding and interacting with Seymour Glass become more apparent. One of the pointers to unearth is the materialism and self-interest that a rich culture has embedded in the mind of Seymour’s wife Muriel, the overtones of which have already begun to engrave themselves in the young mind of Sybil Carpenter. Schooling unmentioned, but possibly a graduate the Fashion Institute of Technology, Muriel is a stuck-up young woman who Salinger only describes as a girl, maybe because of the immaturity that is seen in her obsession with expensive material items like her Saks-Fifth-Avenue blouse, silk dressing gown, rings, and other items that she considers fashionable. Or maybe the designation of “girl” is just simply more fashionably acceptable. Truly immature, however, is the way that she perceives the world through the imaginative lenses that a high-class fashion culture has bought for her.
“’You remember that awful Dinner dress we saw in Bonwit’s window’… ‘She had it on. And all hips’” (8). Oh my. As is taught at the Fashion Institute, never buy anything at Bonwit’s. Muriel’s way of thinking...