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

Pasha Paterson (gpaterso@richmond.edu)
Wed, 18 Nov 1998 18:28:37 -0500

At 17:27 11/18/98 -0500, J J R (Jim) wrote:
>The game me, Matt and, eh, various others were playing was, "How would we
>read Bananafish if we were coming to it for the first time--without ever
>having read anything about Seymour?"
>[...]
>But try to understand Seymour only by reading Bananafish.  What would
>your impressions of him be?  Suppose that was the Only Salinger you'd
>ever read?  What would you think of Seymour then?  Do you think he's
>capable of killing Muriel, and maybe thought about it before shooting
>himself?

All right, I'm game.  Stop me when I get annoying.  :)

Our first image is of an obviously frivolous (or vacuous, as you all
called her) girl, contemptable, saved from "damnable" only by the nature
of her vacuousness, namely, spiritual emptiness.  Seymour himself has
already addressed this (calling her "Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948").
So clearly we are supposed to treat Muriel with suspicion if she turns
out to be the protagonist, and pure contempt if she is only a supporting
character.

Then we get Mrs. Fedder.  She is little better, save for an obvious
concern for her daughter.  This sentiment might cast her in a slightly
more noble light than the Muriel, because it shows some hint of compassion,
but it could also be argued that the mother's worry is purely selfish.
("Oh goddammit the lunatic killed my daughter.  Oh well, let's move on.")
The two women are birds of a feather, as we see in their conversation on
clothes and the horrors of mixed social classes ("You should see what
sits next to us...", etc).

Then we get Seymour.  He is pale, wrapped in a blue bathrobe even while
sunning himself on the beach.  This should already be reinforcing a
feeling of suspicion we foster for him begun when Muriel mentions the
staring-at-trees-while-driving business.  Admittedly, only the most
astute non-Salinger-phile would pick up on the symbolism of blue as a
representation of innocence.  (See Warren French's _JDS Revisited_)

Sybil Carpenter presents a confusing image, because she seems to be named
as a double reference to Christ ("Sybil" being derived from a word for
"angel" and "Carpenter" a possible reference to the Nazarene's former
line of work).  Despite this, she seems unable to make Seymour feel better
in the end.  She is emotionally detached from everything around her, devoid
of all compassion for every being she encounters, from the bananafish to
their desperate creator.

Seymour's behavior with Sybil is (to say the least) strange, and could
either be seen as the product of (1) desperation for companionship or
(2) total insanity, perhaps even with a touch of pedophilia.  If we
consider the former, we feel sorry for Seymour when Sybil runs away
"without regret", because she seemed to be his last (but certainly not
best) hope for a child companion.  If we consider insanity, we feel
more for Sybil, relieved that she got away from this lunatic with her
feet intact.

So let us carry our two possibilities for Seymour through the end of
the story.  I had never thought of the encounter in the elevator as an
attempt to treat the adult woman as he has been treating children, but
the observation seems to me to work very well.  Then, when Seymour shoots
himself, we understand why (He can't stand living here anymore) but the
apparent premeditation of this act seems confusing.  If he was considering
suicide, why didn't he get it over with at home?  Why didn't he just swim
out to sea (as Edna Pontelier does to end her poisonous relationship in
Kate Chopin's _Awakening_)?  Why would he have planned a suicide so far
in advance, and in such a bizarre setting?  We feel for Seymour, but his
situation leaves us confused.

If we take the second route, and dismiss Seymour as a maniac, we are even
more confused.  What began Seymour's foot fetish?  If he had a full clip in
the gun, why didn't he pop Muriel a few times before blowing himself away?
For that matter, why not kill her off and run for the hills?  Committing
suicide without first committing what would have probably been a gratifying
murder is even more confusing than what caused the insanity to begin with.

So I guess in a long winded way, where I was going with this was, on my
first reading of this story, I was left totally dumbfounded.  Either way
you treat Seymour, there are parts of the situation that seem difficult
or impossible to conceive.  Perhaps this is the reason treating it as a
stand-alone story is so difficult, and why "Bananafish" was such a shock
to _New Yorker_ readers when it was released: it cannot be fully under-
stood without at least a little bit of the canon.  (Like, for instance,
Sergeant X's substitution for the word "Hell", giving us the magazine
title "Sex is Fun -- or the Suffering of Being Unable to Love")

>                                                     Selfish children are
>ok.  We expect them to be.  But we hope adults outgrow that a little.  We
>hope :)

Since the canon was back for this...  We expect children to be selfish
because we have already lost our innocence and have become as cynical as
anyone else.  Thus children charitable and compassionate enough to satisfy
an innocent, like Esme or Phoebe, are extraordinarily beneficial indeed,
which, I believe, is part of Salinger's point.

Am I just going overboard / getting boring?  I'm just getting into this.



________________________________________________________

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