Seymour's death
Paul Janse (PJanse@compuserve.com)
Sun, 15 Nov 1998 18:14:27 -0500
What happened to the discussion of Seymour's suicide? Or was this only fo=
r
a FAQ list or something?
Maybe this subject has been discussed to death (no pun intended) but I
haven't seen any of these discussions and the question keeps haunting me:=
not so much about why Seymour killed himself, but why Salinger had him ki=
ll
himself. I am not trying to discuss Salinger's intentions, I am intereste=
d
in the purely literary side of the question. In the artistic effect of
Seymour's suicide. I mean, the last paragraph of this perfect story seems=
to be in a different key (I like musical metaphors). If this is your firs=
t
Salinger story the ending must come as a bolt in the blue. The only reaso=
n
the suicide didn't come to me as a complete shock was that I had read F&Z=
=
and S: AI before Bananafish. *Inside* the story I see absolutely no clue
for this ending. In Muriel's telephone call he is represented as
intelligent but 'unstable'. Her mother is afraid for her sake, she doesn'=
t
seem to expect him to kill himself, or even to fear this. And the 'beach
part' of the story hardly gives any psychological insights, I think.
Chekhov once said that if you show a gun in the first act of a play, the
gun should go off in some other act (referring, more specifically, to his=
own "Seagull"). Gogol loved to sin against this commandment: he very
emphatically 'showed guns' (figuratively speaking) and then deliberately
forgot about them. In Bananafish the opposite happens: the gun goes off
without having been shown before.
And this begs the question: could the story have ended some other way?
Could the last paragraph been substituted by, for instance, Seymour killi=
ng
Muriel instead? Or by Seymour starting to cut his fingernails? Or by
Seymour leaving the hotel and Muriel For Always? If not, why not? Is this=
a
valid question?
I do not mean to say that this 'replacibility' of the ending would distra=
ct
from the value of the story. Maybe it is even *part* of the shock effect.=
The ending of Teddy, which, of course, resembles the ending of Bananafish=
,
is slightly less enigmatic: there *were* references to Teddy's death (we
talked about that before). But there the effect is, in my opinion, much
less powerful. =
To refine my musical simile: I experience the ending of Bananafish like =
a
completely dissonant final chord to a *difficult* but tonal piece of musi=
c
(let's say Stravinsky, Bartok or Ives). It shocks you each time you hear
it, even if you smilingly await the moment.
I hope I have made myself clear; in Dutch it would have been difficult
enough... Anyway, I though it would be nice to leave mrs. Maynard to her
own devices and return to the content of Salinger's work. I liked the
discussions about Just Before the War and Teddy very much.
My herbal 'good night tea' is almost finished, and so is my energy. Good
night.
Paul Janse