In response to Camille's comments: > The thing that interests me most about Teddy is not the fact that it's a > successful story (which I don't think it is and Buddy/Salinger says as > much) but the fact that in S:AI Buddy tells us about how he wrote it in a > sort of imitation of Seymour's story. There's always been that `is Teddy a > reincarnation of Seymour' business, and it's easy to see `Teddy' as a sort > of inversion/partner to `A Perfect Day for Bananafish' - but what I believe > is happening is that one is an adaptation of the other. Teddy is *based* on > Seymour, and the events in `Teddy' can be sort of seen as an artistic > distillation of Seymour's honey moon - I mean `artistic' in the sense of > authorial decision and alteration. We could imagine an author thinking > `hmm, a nice little girl called Sybil. Well, that's no fun. Let's make her > a horrible little girl called Booper. And we better make the hero a kid... I haven't read all of "S:aI" (I'd rather swallow nails than read a hundred pages of the adult form of Buddy Glass) so I would beg to differ with this interpretation of "Teddy". I would agree that "Bananafish" and "Teddy" act as sort of a pair of bookends for the Nine Stories, but I would not go as far as to say that Teddy McArdle was simply a rehash or a reincarnation of Seymour Glass. I'm not saying this simply on some nit-picky technicality of dates (because Teddy would already have been about eight years old when Seymour died) but because I believe they are two very different characters. Seymour cannot seem to cope with adult life because everyone around him is so appallingly phony: Muriel and Mrs. Fedder, Sybil's parents, even Sybil herself. He knows the principle of enlightenment -- namely, that it is achieved through innocence -- but he cannot seem to believe in it without guidance. He needs a true innocent beside him (Sharon Lipschutz perhaps) to bolster his confidence in his own ideals. When Sybil utterly fails him, and he has nothing to go back to save for his poisonous wife, he feels as if he has died long before the bullet goes through his right temple. Teddy, on the other hand, needs no such reinforcement; he is in full contact with the powers that be and is able to completely distance himself from the lethal influences of his deplorable parents and the self-centered "scientists" who would poke and probe him ad nauseam. Teddy's view of the world is totally objective, nearly emotionless (except for a required sense of compassion for his fellow humans), and devoid of materialist aims. Even the physical descriptions of Seymour and Teddy are quite different -- Teddy has gone so far as to abandon the effort of keeping up even minimal outward cleanliness because he knows the extent of his current incarnation's irrelevance. Seymour dies because he wants to, and thus feels he has to; Teddy dies because he merely knows that circumstances beyond his control will cause his death, and he might as well not even try to stop it. "It is pointless even to mention it" he notes in his journal -- hardly something we would expect to hear from Seymour. Likewise, the supporting cast is also vastly different: Booper has none of the crippling effect on Teddy that Sybil does on Seymour; the McArdles cannot hope to exert the same force over Teddy that Muriel apparently does on Seymour; and one could hardly claim that Nickolson (Isn't that his name?) is in any way related to Sybil in terms of role in their respective stories. The two stories may come at opposite ends of the book, and the two protagonists may be on the same spiritual quests, but I would not go so far as to say that one is a mere reiteration of another. Of course, I could be wrong. :) I'm not one to discount my critics. > ...too, because people might get the wrong idea if he's an adult. Why not make > him her sister ...' etc etc. If you make Teddy Booper's sister, people might get a wrong idea after all... :) ________________________________________________________ G.H.G.A.Paterson (804)662-3737 gpaterso@richmond.edu ________________________________________________________