Subject: Re: Seymour's death - another view
From: Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@english.uga.edu)
Date: Wed May 24 2000 - 06:00:32 GMT
Mark offered, via proxy:
> Seymour’s suicide is not simply the expression of a man
> who is tired of life. If that were the case, he could have
> ended things by swimming out to sea, for instance.
> His death would have looked like a bathing accident.
But the only way to lead the reader to believe that Seymour is going to
harm Muriel is to narrate him performing a series of calculatedly
ambiguous and/or misleading actions, with that gun, in her immediate
proximity. Content bows to form here. Can you imagine what Scottie's
proposed "death-behind-the-dune" would look like?
...he kicked out the three metal legs of the tripod and dropped them
onto the sand. He cranked the elevating wheel of the Mk. I .303"
Vickers Machine Gun twice. He folded up the backsight and swung the
barrel around toward the balcony of room 507. Through the open window,
he traced in the sight the outline of the calf-skin luggage, the
nail-lacquer bottle and the foot of the bed. "Damned feet!" he
muttered, as the cross-hairs came to rest the girl's forhead. He
clamped the locking mechanism and employed the "one second delay" lever,
then pulled the trigger and leap-frogged over the 28.7 inches of gun
barrel directly into the stream of metal slugs that began to pour out of
the muzzle.
The "reason" for staging the suicide in the room with Muriel is a
function of the effects the *author* wants to produce. It has only
secondarily to do with the effects *Seymour* wants his violence to have.
Speculating about a different kind of death assumes a specific kind of
Seymour, which I think is only supposed to happen *after* the story's
been read at least once. "Seymour" begins to crystallize only after he
shoots himself. All we are supposed to know until then is that he's
unstable, that he plays with little girls, that he tells a story about
how material greed can kill you, and that he's waving a gun around in
his room next to his "spiritual tramp" of a wife.
The war-veteran information vies with the other ambiguous details
Muriel's mother provides. I see a potential link between war experience
and psychological distress, but to me the link isn't quite so
overpowering, and it's certainly not dictatorial. It's not the only, or
even the principal, information that drives our understanding of Seymour
up to the conclusion. Mark's reading I think presumes a certain kind of
"Seymour" in order to explain the events of the story after the fact. I
have no quarrel with this, especially as my own reading does the same
thing. Any reading, really. But my understanding of the story is
entirely different from my theory here about the experience the reader
is supposed to have as he reads for the first time. A difference
between the story's "meaning" and its intended effect. What fails is
the intended effect, and though I realize it's all too easy to say, as
Cecelia puts it, "we're not led to expect something that doesn't
actually happen?", I think it's true.
In fact, the confusion about Seymour's motivations--is it the war, or is
it the bananafish?--only supports the claim that the story is a mess.
We aren't lead directly enough to expect what in fact doesn't happen.
-- Matt Kozusko
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