Re: Seymour's Suicide
Mattis Fishman (mattis@argos.argoscomp.com)
Thu, 17 Jul 1997 10:56:13 -0400
Tim writes:
>The point is, I guess, that sometimes these things just happen. You get
>an introspective fellow married to someone who has different priorities,
>and the two of them just don't see things the same way. He cares about
>her and he loves her, but he knows they won't quite have similar
>outlooks in their lives. And most of the time I believe he accepts it.
>Though there are times he calls me to get the load off his mind, and,
>sure, I worry about him. He wouldn't hurt her. But the sadness he
>radiates is something you can almost touch. But it's directed at
>himself and the chasm between the life with his life and the life beyond
>his wife's world.
I think your story is very appropriate. I wonder, though, if this is not
the case between any two people, maybe even inevitable?
>And that, in many ways, is how I read the 1948 Seymour, before Salinger
>tried to tie him together into some larger mosaic.
I agree, but don't you wish that we could know how the enlightened
Seymour would have reacted, or perhaps remedied the situation?
A radical thought is that he would have done the same thing, that is,
that the purpose of extending Seymour's character was to show that in
his unhappy circumstance, suicide was an act of an enlightened rather
than a desperate man (I call it radical because the usual retrofitting
repaints the situation by saying that he was not unhappy, rather fulfilled).
It doesn't sound right to me, however.
Perhaps Salinger simply hadn't figured the answer to this koan.
All the best,
Mattis