Subject: Re: New ending for CITR
From: Jim Rovira (jrovira@drew.edu)
Date: Thu Nov 08 2001 - 11:24:53 GMT
Well, yeah, I did address that in an earlier post. You're right --
Seymour's suicide was totally unexpected, totally out of the blue, his shot
hits the reader as a terrible shock, and we run back through the text after
reading the end looking for clues...but don't get much other than an
oblique story about some strange fish :)
As a story by itself, it's hard to really understand what the reader is
supposed to get out of it. I think some people see Bananafish as a
defective story because of that. As a story in the Glass Family Canon, it
sets up Glass family fiction quite well -- and especially Buddy's own work,
which seems to be trying to answer the question that we all ask after
reading "Bananafish" -- why did Seymour do it? In that case, "Bananafish"
is a teaser guiding our reading of the rest of the Glass canon, shedding
light on it, and demanding to be understood in the light of it. You could
then argue that suicide does indeed seem to be all through Salinger's Glass
family fiction.
But I don't think, even then, that it's about suicide per se. I think
suicide may be a symbol of rejection of human society and refusal to
participate in it. We see that in Franny, we see it in Holden, and we see
it in Salinger himself.
The only other work I can think of with Holden (as we know him in Catcher)
is "An Ocean Full of Bowling Balls," a pretty good story (in my opinion)
about Allie's death. We don't really have much of a Caulfield Family Canon
to work with, no big mystery hanging over us to solve. The kid was sick,
wanted to go swimming, and died because of his weak constitution (so far as
I remember). I felt after reading some of Salinger's other
"underpublished" fiction that he'd written himself into a corner with the
Caulfield family and had to write the Glass family to open it back up
again. Hard to say for sure.
I'm not really that big on psychology myself -- I was going to perhaps
double major in it, then minor in it, before I finally dropped it because
too much of what I was studying seemed like pure crap. But the most useful
things I did manage to study had to do with working with people in crisis.
It seemed pretty intelligently researched and based on good,
straightforward observation. It seemed to me that the discipline of
psychology worked the best when it relied on theory the least and paying
attention to people the most. When I get home tonight I can see if I still
have any of that stuff laying around and will post it later if you're
interested.
Jim
Scottie Bowman wrote:
>
> '... the surprise ending needs to be consonant with the rest
> of the text ...'
>
> And yet this list takes its name from a story that has spawned
> a great deal of conjecture - from Matt K.'s test onward - as to
> the inevitability, or even expectedness, of its ending.
>
> I was most interested to read what we're 'told by psychologists'.
> I've always found them a wonderful guide & comfort in this uncertain
> world.
>
> Scottie B.
>
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