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

Baader, Cecilia (cbaader@casecorp.com)
Thu, 19 Nov 1998 13:15:17 -0600 

> 	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?"
> 	>>[...]
> 
> 	G.H.G.A.Paterson wrote:
> 	>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.  
> 
> 	Ditto.  I'm going to break the rules of the game and bring other
> stories into this, so I'll apologize at the outset.  I'd like to offer
> another viewpoint of Seymour:  that of a man, convinced that his work
> was done in this "appearance," unable to adapt to what he had become.
> 
> 
		And he couldn't stand living as the man that he had
become.  Is it just shell-shock?  In RHtR,C, Buddy mentions in passing
that Seymour had been spending the last several months with Oppenheim.
(For where else could a boy genius grown be best used in the war effort
but in helping to develop the atomic bomb?)  Makes me wonder what is
left unsaid...  Is it that Seymour has simply gone crazy or maybe more
than that?  Can he stand to live with the consequences of his wartime
occupation?

		"I can see you're looking at my feet,"  he says.  But is
it really a foot fetish?  Or is it the way that he's already examining
and reexamining every facet of his existence?  Seymour would never do
anything without examining it  from every angle.

		Or is it just another manifestation of his same
obsessive need to watch trees?  Or any number of tiny compulsive
behaviors that Muriel has apparently been sharing with her mother?  He's
not a maniac,  he's merely convinced himself that he's done everything
that he needed to do and is no longer of any use to his family.

		He'd done all that he could for the younger Glass
children:  they'd already been educated and shaped; they had only to
continue their own training.  As far as he was concerned,  he was no
longer needed.  Think about it: the ghost of Seymour that haunts the
rest of the stories is not who he was at the end of his life.  It's the
pre-war Seymour who taught them what books to read, who made them shine
their shoes for the fat lady, who played ping pong badly.  

		Believing that he has more "appearances" to come, why
shouldn't Seymour end it now, when it has become clear to him that there
is nothing to salvage from this lifetime?

		Long-winded for a first posting, I know...

		Cecilia Baader.