Re: Kings in the back row
Matthew_Stevenson@baylor.edu
Tue, 10 Feb 1998 10:44:20 -0600
>(2) How much of Buddy's admiration for Seymour do we share? Are we really
>made to feel that Seymour is brilliant, successful, and crazy?
>
>I suspect most of us have a lot of time for Zooey, and probably all of us
>for Buddy, otherwise we wouldn't have survived his narration. But as we
>read the stories, do we find the focal point is Seymour, or rather Buddy's
>feelings towards Seymour, expressed and elaborated upon, wrestling with
>ambivalent feelings? This, I think, returns us to Alsen's (Glass Stories
>as a Composite Novel) two ways of reading the stories... I think the order
>of publication, expressing the development of Buddy's feelings after his
>brother's death, is more interesting than attempting a chronological order
>of, say, Seymour's life.
i think that something we have to remember is that in Seymour: an Introduction
Buddy says something about how his siblings commented that the seymour in
buddy's stories is more like buddy than seymour. look at seymour as an
extension of buddy, as something that he lost somewhere along the way and has
never been quite able to get back. seymour might be analogous to allie from
catcher as an idealized figment from the past more than as a real person. i
think we need to look at how much of buddy is projected onto seymour and how
much of ourselves we project onto seymour as we read about him (or any of
salinger's characters).--matt