Seymour's Death -- "Et tu, Muriel?"

Pasha Paterson (gpaterso@richmond.edu)
Tue, 17 Nov 1998 19:48:38 -0500

I am about to sort of respond to all five quotes below.  Bear with me.

Camille Scaysbrook:
> But then again, by killing off the character who was to occupy him (we
> assume) for the next thirty years, Salinger has something very important -
> a ready-made saint. Everything about Seymour is given the gloss of
> nostalgia; there isn't a need to make him `real' as such, but a symbol for
> all of the Glass family to aspire to. You could call Seymour the most
> frequently absent main character in literature (:

Matthew Stevenson:
> jim, i think the real question here is: why did salinger end the story
the way
> he did rather than some other way?  what is the significance of seymour
> shooting himself rather than muriel (whom the virgin reader must admit as an
> option up to the final sentence or two)?

Paul Janse:
>                                                But here... if he would have
> killed Muriel, would it *really* have been a different Seymour? 

J J R (Jim):
> But if Seymour had shot Muriel instead, well, that would change all of
> Salinger's world, I think.

Sean Draine:
>                                    Looking at Salinger's work as a whole,
> particularly at Seymour's (alive or dead) prominent role,                   

On Seymour's Conspicuous Absence

Had Seymour Glass not taken his own life instead of Muriel's, he would not
have been a sufficiently tragic figure to exert the influence he has on his
younger Glass siblings.  And I mean "tragic" in its most classical (perhaps
"Shakespearean") sense.  In this way we might draw a parallel between
Seymour's influence on the Glasses and Julius Caesar's "absent presence" in
Shakespeare's play.  Both characters die of tragic nearsightedness.  Neither
knows what they are walking into until it is too late to leave.

On Seymour as the Bananafish

Seymour kills himself because he sees himself as a bananafish.  He commits
suicide perhaps because he realizes what Teddy McArdle has known all along:
that physical death is not only meaningless to an average human being, but
also beneficial/liberating to an American one.  His bananas are not material
greed (he's just not that way) nor are they children (why would innocence
kill?).  The killing force he unwittingly swallows, as I see it, is false
innocence.  He must, at one time, have seen Muriel as exactly what he was
looking for, a companion in innocence.  Muriel, though, only fakes it,
and only after their marriage has she revealed herself to be the phony that
she is.  Seymour must search the world over for children who have not yet
lost their innocence to the phonies around them -- Sharon Lipschutz appears
to have been one of them.  But Sybil Carpenter, despite her name's ironic
double-allusion to the Christian savior, is Seymour's worst nightmare: a
child of only five years who is already as heartless, dispassionate, phony
as her materialist parents and his materialist wife.  When Sybil says she
sees a bananafish with six bananas in its mouth, she does so with no remorse,
no feeling of sadness at all, no mourning for this dying being, and thus
Seymour's subtle cry for help is mercilessly crushed.  He gives up on finding
enlightenment in his current incarnation and cannot survive it a day longer.

On Seymour Killing Muriel

If Seymour had killed Muriel, dangerous interpretive doors would open.  We
might have said that Seymour saw Muriel as the bananafish, and killed her
to save her from a long, painful death in her banana hole.  This, however,
would have made him no better than Mark Chapman: a Catcher gone mad,
obsessed with the quest but blind to its true objective.  If Seymour is to
have been the tragic figure that he is, such an outcome would be crucially
destructive to such an image.  Seymour committing murder would have
trivialized his original compassion for the bananafish and discounted his
actions as those of a damnable lunatic, rather than a tragic figure
condemned by his own mistaken faith in the woman he once tried to love.

Of course, I might also be full of it.  This is just the way I see it
right now.  It has changed, it will change again.  Poke holes in the
above arguments where appropriate.



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 G.H.G.A.Paterson  (804)662-3737  gpaterso@richmond.edu
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