who is the Real Seymour?


Subject: who is the Real Seymour?
madhava@sprynet.com
Date: Sat Feb 19 2000 - 14:23:13 EST


"------------------------------------------------------
hmm, I don't think madman. I think they would see him as shell-shocked, battle fatigued, a soldier come home. I think that's the story. It's about innocence (Sybil) and experience (Myrrial) and innocence after experience (Seymour). His innocence being attained the moment he pulls the trigger (not the moment the bullet hits his skull). It's Blake. That's how I saw it before I read the rest of the Glasses'.

-jason
---------------------------------"

I had already met the Glass family and heard about Seymours fate before reading APFBF so finding that story stuck in along with the 9 was bit shocking, like being a witness to something that I never expected to see. Does anyone know offhand the order that the stories were presented? When did the chronologial reader and get this story in relation to other Glass Family episodes?

As for the meaning of Bananafish, to me Seymour, as the enlightened older brother who commit suicide, is the best, most artistic/honest way that JDS could express that which is the most important vital thing he had, which was his relationship to God (or Spirit or Creator or All That Is <whatever It May Be>). I always understood Seymour this way because I can relate to that kind of a feeling toward God. As an older brother that I am closer to than anyone, who has led me to so much beauty and through so much pain and who has has left me violently in a world that seems crazy and stupid a lot of the time. Of course I don't feel this way all the time but regularly enough to recognize Seymour when I see him.

So what is all this about understanding Bananfish? It's asking why Seymour has left us here, and what we're supposed to do without him. For the Seeker, the Artist, the Scientist, this is *the* question. And Salinger has left what clues he could throughout the Glass family and their ravings, their reveries, their breakdowns, and their lifting one another up.

At the heart of things are some pretty paradoxical spiritual questions that leave us in sometimes in a tragedy, sometimes in comedy, and hopefully not in a boring drama.

Maybe Salinger's suggesting that God can only Be here for just so long, and do just so much. Jesus for example.

But is Salingers work really about Seymour, or is it about his Family? Maybe this is what that post (please forgive me for not knowing anyone's name yet.) was getting at when they said Seymour's personality begins with his death. Because Seymour knows he can't eat any more bananas or he'll get stuck in this hole, he exits.

Here's my Big Question- the one I would ask the Old Man if I met him: Was Seymours death some sort of spiritual success or was it a cop out, a failure and a letting down of his family and of God? I guesse there's no real answer to this queation, maybe it's actually the undercurrent of the the whole Glass family chronicles as the question that deep in the mind of each of the family members. Seymour was the best of them all, their leader. Can we accept what he did as good? can we forgive him if not?

OK, OK, much too much thinking out loud than ettiquet allows, I wasn't trying t bore anyone.

Love,
Madhava
NYC

-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Mar 02 2000 - 19:30:22 EST