Seymour Is A Banana Fish example essay topic

A Perfect Day For BananafishBy J.D. Salinger Perfect Day For Banana fish was written in 1948 by the American writer Jerome David Salinger. This was just three years after the ending of World War II, where Salinger was stationed in Berlin, Germany. From further analysis of the short-story I have come to the conclusion that Seymour is Salinger's role model. Seymour has just returned from World War II, as well as Salinger had when he wrote the story.

Seymour returns to his native country very confused, dysfunctional and with some psychic issues. From the conversation between Muriel and her mother, we acknowledge that Seymour didn't act normally after he has returned from the war. He destroyed "all those lovely pictures from Bermuda" for example. He has also been seeing a lot of psychiatrists and he's all covered up, even when lying on the beach, too embarrassed to let people see his tattoo from the army. Seymour IS a banana fish.

He has seen too many awful and horrible things during the war like holocaust, starving people, shootings, executions, bombings, deaths of his friends etc. - he has eaten too many bananas. And when he returns to his native country he just doesn't fit in anymore. He returns totally changed, very confused, because he has seen things he couldn't imagine could actually happen. And then in the end he dies, just like the banana fish. Therefore Seymour wants to save Sybil because he cares a lot about her. He wants to tell her, that if you get too much of something, you will never be able to return to normal, and it " ll kill you in the end.

At Sybil's age she's very affectionate and naive, but this is the world she " ll grow up in and therefore it's a perfect day for banana fish - to go look for banana fishes and experience herself what getting too much of something may result in. Muriel, Seymour's wife, and her parents, are representing the kind of America the soldiers in World War II return to. They are unaware of what exactly has taken place and what kinds of unexplainable cruelties these soldiers have experienced. On top of that, Muriel and her mother seem very self-centered and extremely shallow, which doesn't make it any better for Seymour to return to, even though they seem to show great concern for him and his kind of behavior.

For example, we are being told about Muriel that "she was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty". Muriel's mother is also extremely concerned for Muriel because now Seymour has some psychic problems, she sees him as some loony maniac. In spite of this, we know how Seymour behaves in the episode on the beach with Sybil, and Muriel's beliefs about Seymour are therefore somehow not entirely correct, even though Seymour does act like one in the elevator on his way back to his hotel room. To explain the tragic ending it's important to know that Salinger, at the time he wrote the story, showed great interest in Zen attitudes. According to Zen attitudes suicide is not a failure, but a triumph, which combined with the belief that Seymour is Salinger's role model, explains why Salinger lets Seymour commit suicide.

Of course it's also about the whole banana fish symbolic that Seymour is a banana fish and therefore, to make the comparison complete, has to face his destiny, which is his death.