Subject: Re: no more balls
ErsatzAzalea@aol.com
Date: Sat May 04 2002 - 00:23:10 EDT
In a message dated 5/3/2002 2:16:20 PM Eastern Standard Time,
mbombard@middlebury.edu writes:
> One last comment: I don't think there is any way that the character in
> "Bananafish" is Buddy Glass. I actually don't even see how someone could
> suggest it (did someone actually suggest it...or was I misinterpreting?).
> Muriel and her mother both refer to her husband as Seymour, and we know
> from "Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters" that Muriel and Seymour are
> husband and wife. Sybil refers to him as See More Glass, and he kills
> himself at the end (all pointing to the fact that he is Seymour).
In "Seymour" (it may have been "Raise High" i'm not sure), Buddy says that
when his parents and siblings read "Bananafish", they said it wasn't about
Seymour at all but about Buddy. Not to mention, Buddy had a reverence for
his brother, there was no way he could have truly known what he was thinking.
It was Buddy's misrepresentation of Seymour, a perception based more on self
than on who Seymour really was. Seymour is a mystery, the only really solid
piece of Seymour that the readers receive is in his diary in "Raise High",
and maybe the dialogues he shared but those may have been misconstrewed as
well.
I have a question though... did Salinger have an elder brother die
himself? I've been wondering, since in pretty much all of his publications
there is an elder brother of the narrator who dies. Just curious, he just
seems to have a very realistic way of illustrating a mourning like that...
but then again, he's an artist.
Have a good night
~Mel
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