Re: Seymour


Subject: Re: Seymour
oconnort@nyu.edu
Date: Mon Feb 10 1997 - 19:07:00 GMT


 
> We must remember that the story is supposed to stand on its own.
> It is not just a story detailing Seymour's suicide so we know what
> Buddy is talking about later on. Buddy's stories are of course
> about his dealing with Seymour's death, as many of us have pointed
> out. I think the story is about how war destroys a man. It seems
> clear to me that Seymour is insane at this point, yet he was a
> very intelligent and sane man before the war as we are shown in so
> many stories by Buddy. I have the feeling that I have just
> embarrassed myself and that I will be banashed from bananfish but
> please gie me some feedback so that I can understand Salinger's
> stories correctly if I am not.

It would be a most un-Seymour thing for you to be banished!

I agree with you that it is most important to remember that "Bananafish"
is, after all, a standalone story. That it happened to plant the seed
in the writer's mind for a later series of remarkable stories is
interesting but not pertinent to any consideration of this one story.

I'm not sure I would agree with you that Seymour was *insane*, though
there are other, less severe, clinical terms that could be used to
describe his behavior throughout the story.

JDS, like many writers since the '20s, was quite aware of Hemingway's
fiction, and I suspect that if we could ask him about it, we would
find that he had read and absorbed Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River."

Hemingway described his writing of that story as an attempt to write
about war without mentioning the war. (He was illustrating his point
about making a story stronger by omitting certain facts, which readers
would then infer by reading what had *not* been omitted. His theory
was that it made the story stronger.)

And so we see Nick Adams coming back to a forest-fire-scarred world
carrying his physical baggage and learning again how to do the things
he used to do when he was younger and more innocent.

Aside from the obvious need to eat and find a comfortable place to
sleep, and to catch fish, and to stay warm, Nick is (we infer) a
man coming home from some brutal experience and trying to find for
himself what "peace" really means. Nick Adams has a strong, if
slightly cracked, foundation for his new-found peace. Seymour is
quite the opposite. He is fragile and set to detonate --
emotionally -- at the slightest pressure.

Nick Adams found his sanctuary in the woods of Michigan, which was
the exact right place for him. Seymour was in precisely the wrong
place, almost certainly with the wrong person, when he discovered
that he was nowhere near the sanctuary he needed. And so he made
his choice.

It is imagining the moment after the gunshot in "Bananafish" that
has always been an irresistable exercise for me. I cannot help
envisioning Muriel's reaction upon being awakened by the noise.
What did she think? Annoyance at being disturbed? Grief for
Seymour? Pity for herself? And I wonder about those perfectly
manicured nails, and the motions they made in the air....

This moment-after-the-ending is one reason, I suspect, that the
story has such a hold on my imagination.

--tim o'connor

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