Re: seymour
Lagusta Pauline Yearwood (ly001f@uhura.cc.rochester.edu)
Mon, 06 Oct 1997 18:53:57 -0400 (EDT)
hey 'fishers,
like tim, i've been drowning in beginning of the semester work. but i saw
this nice polite request, and remembered first discovering salinger and
being confused about some of this same stuff, so i thought i'd write a
little before i have to rush to work.
> I haven't read anything about them- Well, why did Seymour kill himself?
i'm not even going to get into this one with only 20 minutes...probably
the best thing to to would be to go and look at the bananafish archives,
the address is in the welcome list you got when you subscribed.
there are a lot of interpretations of seymour's suicide, but my opinion
(ok, so i am getting into it) has always been the very simple explanation
that he just got tired of it all. he felt the same way holden and frannie
(you'll read about her in "frannie and zooey" and "raise high...") did
that drove them out of school. just fed up with all the "pedants and
tearer-downers," as frannie puts it. fed up with everything.
that's the simple explanation, but i think there are actually a lot of
reasons. maybe he felt that he was just too spiritually advanced to stay
here any longer, that this was the thing for him to do. maybe he loved
muriel too much (in..um..."raise high..." (??) in his journal he discusses
how happy muriel makes him feel)...
> Who was the girl on the beach? Who was the girl in the room? and that
as far as i can tell, the girl on he beach was just some random girl.
the girl in the room was his wife, muriel.
> thing about banana fish, is that some analogy for something else? Pardon
> my stupidity, but do I need to have read "Seymour an Introduction" or
> something else before I can understand this? Someone please explain.
hmm, the bananafish. i kind of agree with what some book of lit crit says:
that the bananafish are metaphors for people who cannot purge their
emotions, they have no outlet for letting go of things. just like the
medicine cabinet in the glass house (you'll get to that later), they are
overstuffed and can't function. seymour loves muriel so much that he
drives into trees (maybe that's why..?), holden can't stop thinking about
james castle and old schools, the ducks in central park, stradler, the
fact that jane kept her kings in the last row, it's driving him crazy that
he can't get rid of any of those memories. he misses everything. ("don't
ever tell anyone anything, you'll start missing it"). the bananafish crawl
into a hole and become so glutted with enotion that they can't swim out,
and they die.
so maybe seymour was a bananafish. holden, at the end when he's crying
when phoebe's on the carousel, maybe he's purging himself of some emotions
there and narrowly escaping becoming a bananafish himself. frannie
certainly is one. is teddy?
or maybe this whole theory sucks. i like it right now though, it seems to
neatly explain a lot. and i just thought of that medicine cabinet analogy
and i think it's damn good. :)
so, kristen, those are my ideas. i hope this helped ease some
confusion. and yep, i think you should read "seymour" tout de suite.
ahh, french is creeping in so maybe i should go. it's telling me that i've
taken too much time off from it.
lagusta