Subject: Re: Seymour's suicide
From: Cecilia Baader (ceciliaann@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed May 24 2000 - 19:33:14 GMT
Bruce wrote:
>Any connection between the little girl in Seymour's haiku and Sybil?
I'd say that it's more than likely, given the Seymour's state of mind at the
time. Let's look at the poem again:
The little girl on the plane
Who turned her doll's head around
To look at me
Seymour, on the final day of his life, seems to cherish innocence. We see
it in the gentle attitude towards Sybil, the way that he kisses her sweet
little foot, etc.
But Seymour is also in a state that makes him believe that there is nothing
left that is good in this incarnation-- "Stop looking at my feet" he tells
the lady in the elevator, and that same afternoon he writes a poem which
also describes someone looking at him. He cannot bear to be *seen*.
Seymour's haiku is introduced in later stories, so we have to fit it into
the flawed Bananafish narrative to see if we can make any sense of it. If,
as Buddy claims, Bananafish is more a portrait of himself than of Seymour,
we need to look for the themes that survive into the later stories in order
to sift out some sort of Truth out of the detritus. Two of the things that
we can lift from Bananafish and see carried in the later fiction are what?
Maybe an obsession with innocence and an aversion to someone *seeing* him?
So this begs the question, if this is Seymour's suicide note, what is he
saying?
The Bananafish answer, I think, is Buddy's. Seymour's is different, no?
Regards,
Cecilia.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Jun 01 2000 - 09:45:26 GMT