Re: Why did Seymour kill himself?
Diego Dell'Era (dellerad@sinectis.com.ar)
Tue, 20 Jan 1998 00:37:51 -0800
hi everyone! i've come back from my holidays and burnt my brains a bit
reading JDS on the beach (southern hemisphere, keep in mind...). i've
been thinking about Seymour, and related some of his
not-so-nice-for-us-moral-readers actions to a couple of issues.
beauty, in the first place (how else?).
remember the narrator in "the laughing man"? he tells us about the
beauty of 3 women, one of them being a girl who threw a lighter to a
dolphin. isn't this exactly the same kind of thing Seymour does with
Charlotte? if we put greenpeace prejudices aside, and consider the
situation as it is presented to us in the story, it's beautiful. the
girl is on a cruising voyage, and sees a dolphin. she wants to come
across it, to comunicate, and having no better way she throws the first
thing that comes handy (itself a very human size behavior). isn't it the
kind of experience Zooey loves (the girl and the dog)?. don't know,
perhaps i'm overdoing these similarities, but these days i value human
contact above many, many petty things.
tragedy, in the second place. i think some Glasses have a sense of
hybris, the concept the ancient greeks had for humans challenging the
gods. for example, when walt puts his hand on eloise's belly and feels
so comfortable there, he wants a cop to order him to put the other hand
out of the window, to do the right thing, in order not to attempt
against the balance of the universe, i guess. it can be read in a tender
way (walt was funny), but Seymour is more extreme. his paranoia in
reverse might be read as fear of being too much happy, a thing the
greeks did fear. hybris was the hallmark of all tragical heroes who
found death through excess. a critic called JDS narrative a modern,
romantic epic (will hochmann, academic backup here?). although we don't
regard Seymour as a hero, most of us look up to him.
(every time i ponder over Seymour's death and get carried out, mr.
anticlimax flies to me like a valkyria, with 3 words in his approaching
tongue: "he is dead").
diego