Subject: Re: Cheever and Salinger
From: Cecilia Baader (ceciliabaader@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Jun 20 2002 - 23:35:31 EDT
--- Jim Rovira <jrovira@drew.edu> wrote:
>
> I don't know why Salinger chose "six" Bananafish, but it's not the thing
> that I'd necessarily feel needs to have meaning ascribed to it. The
> number of bananafish doesn't seem significant because I don't think
> the number 6 recurs in the story at all.
Oh, I think that with Salinger, you can't call anything insignificant.
I'd never looked into it very carefully before, but "A Perfect Day for
Bananafish" was written before he'd gotten very deeply into Eastern
religion, so I think he was still operating on a Judeo-Christian symbolic
platform.
The Christian avenue turned up no leads, but when I started looking into
the significance of the number six in the Jewish Kabbalah tradition, I
found the tradition that there are six levels of the Jewish soul.
And if the story of the bananafish is the story of soulsickness, that
would make sense, yes? All six of the bananafish had eaten themselves to
death, and so this is the end. He could try nothing more. It seems to me
that this is simply another of the many clues to what Seymour is about to
do, and why he is about to do it.
I found a website that spoke of the six levels of healing, each of which
gets more mystical as each descends into the deeper reaches of the soul.
Here's an URL if you're interested:
http://www.inner.org/6levels/level1.htm
I know there's a few bananafish who certainly know more on the subject of
Judaism than me. What do you think?
Regards,
Cecilia.
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