Re: Seymour's death
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Thu, 19 Nov 1998 17:28:45 +1100
J J R wrote:
> The talk of Seymour's emotional unstability at the beginning, and the
> conversation about Bananafish with the little girl does hint at something
> happening. If he had just cut his fingernails at the end, we'd REALLY be
> wondering why the hell we bothered to read the story at all :)
YES. Like I said before, I think we're underestimating Salinger's skill
here to imply that he just went `oh well' and tacked a suicide on the end
of it. The story's full of deliberate misleadings and plain old enigmas -
because ultimately, if the suicide was explained in a `Seymour looked at
Sybil and felt very very guilty' kind of way, it would a) be very boring
and anticlimatic b) would deny the fact that *any* suicide is pretty much
unexplainable. Not to mention c) He would have had a lot less to write
about in the past 30 years (: We're talking about a guy who spends a whole
day just deciding which *word* to use here. I don't think he's the kind of
guy who'd tack on *anything* - let alone the character who was to become
foremost in his pantheon.
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
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