Re: nothing whatsoever to do with nirvana :)

Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Sat, 10 Apr 1999 11:35:29 +1000

Depressed wrote:
> I read bananafish and i Really liked it.
> But then I read Seymour: an introduction (or maybe it was raise high
> the roof...) and there buddy says that he wrote bananafish and that
> people have said that seymour, in that story, was more like him
> (buddy) than really seymour.
> Which means that the story wasn't "true", i mean it isn't real! I was
> kinda disapointed.

I wouldn't necessarily see it that way. What the story was, ultimately, was
a text-within-a-text. That is, Buddy interpreting his own family history.
I've often wondered to what extend we are to take Buddy's proclamation that
he wrote `Teddy' and `Bananafish' - does this mean he also wrote `Down at
the Dingy' and `Uncle Wiggily' - or for that matter any of the non-Glassy
Nine Stories (there is nothing to say that Sergeant X isn't Buddy, or the
boy in `The Laughing Man' either). Because if `Buddy' (rather than Salinger
per se) wrote these stories, then all of them are as you say a `fiction'.
Well, naturally they're *all* fiction, but they're also a fiction within
the fictional world - i.e. rather than hearing the true details of Walter's
death or of  Seymour's suicide, Buddy has attempted to reconstruct them,
inserting his own opinions and prejudices. If this fact was restricted only
to `Bananafish' it could just be a handy way of Salinger removing an early,
unsatisfactory version of Seymour and his mythology from the Glass canon.

And hey, ultimately we're talking about fictional characters anyway ...
though sometimes it doesn't seem like it. Sometimes, though, I wonder if
it's not the Glasses who are real and Salinger who is fictional (: 

For those of you who have read Nabokov's `Pale Fire' - did Charles Kinbote
invent John Shade or did John Shade invent Charles Kinbote (I would have
said the former, but in an unpublished draft of Nabokov's autobiography he
accidentally let slip that he thought it was the latter)

Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
@ THE INVERTED FOREST http://www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest