We know he has tried to shock Muriel and we expect him to go further. We know that Seymore has attempted suicide before. Now I don't think it's a trite surprise ending. Is it prepared or is it just a trite surprise ending? then I don't see why we can't liken the kiss on her feet to the washing of the Biblical disciples' own.īefore we move on from this story, I wanted to ask if people thought the ending was appropriate. because after all, if we readers can put meaning into Sybil's first name for example, comparing her to a prophetess, etc. That was just a little theory of mine I posted earlier. I'm thinking maybe Seymour was making another attempt by hanging this time and he tried to kick off standing on Granny's chair.Īs for the kiss planted on Sybil's feet, I actually have no real idea what significance could be attributed to it, if any. My own interpretation of Granny's chair is not comic at all, it is rather gruesome. It's a comic line and I don't think even Salinger had anything specific in mind. To be honest I laugh every time i read that line. It's a suggestion to associate childhood innocence with a level of spirituality, but I can't find anything more than that. Whille I do agree that there might be a religious suggestion to the feet, I do think that's just stretching the significance too far. Seymour could have been making a reference to himself.Īs for Muriel giggling at being called Miss Spiritual Tramp, either she doesn't have a clue or she just couldn't care less. So, bananafish could mean a crazy or deranged person. In the English language the word "fish" is an informal term for a person thus, we say sometimes, He's an odd fish or He's not a bad fish.Īnd "bananas" also means crazy, deranged. And the fact that she giggles when disclosing the new name to her mother suggests she is without a clue. I'm not yet convinced there is anything sexual in the story, the name he begins to call his wife is "Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948" he might have called her just a tramp or Miss World Tramp of 1948, but with all that he may have experienced in the war it is the spirit something much deeper or beyond sex that he identifies with or is looking for. Perhaps my analogy was not as clear as I'd intended, but I was trying to paint him as a banana fish who swam into the hole and had eaten the one-too-many-eth banana that put him over the limit to swim out through the door. While the bananafish literally die of their fever, those who are ensnared in materialism’s grasp “die” psychologically and are unable to lead normal, healthy lives again.In short I was trying to suggest it was the last straw, a realization that he doesn't belong. He doesn’t explain what this is, but his use of the word fever here seems to suggest that the greed and gluttony that consumerism can kick up in a person are a type of mental fever-that is, materialism thrusts people into a fanatic and frenzied mental state. In Seymour’s story, the bananafish, overstuffed with bananas, die of so-called banana fever. Like the bananafish with their swollen stomachs, unable to squeeze back out through the hole, those who become beholden to wealth and greed can never escape that life. In Seymour’s story, just one taste of a banana triggers the bananafish to gluttonously overindulge (“Why, I’ve known some bananafish to eat as many as seventy-eight bananas,” Seymour tells Sybil gravely), which suggests that a single taste of luxury incites a similar kind of single-minded obsession and overindulgence. Just like the holes are filled with bananas, the resort is overflowing with wealth-designer clothing, calf-skin luggage, silks, and more. However, it’s also possible to consider the bananafish and their insatiable appetites in the context of the resort-goers’ similarly insatiable materialism. Indeed, it seems that the bananafish symbolize soldiers who went into the war as regular, run-of-the-mill men (like the bananafish prior to swimming into the banana hole) but then witnessed and committed so many violent acts (feasted on so many bananas) that they eventually died-whether mentally, emotionally, spiritually, or physically (succumbing to banana fever). Once inside those holes, the bananafish feast on bananas until they’re so fat that they can’t swim back out of the hole, at which point they die of “banana fever.” Given that Seymour has recently returned from fighting in World War II and is clearly still haunted by all he witnessed there, it’s reasonable that those experiences would bleed into the story he makes up for Sybil. As the story goes, bananafish are much like regular fish, only they swim into holes that are full of bananas. The titular bananafish-a kind of fish that Seymour makes up to entertain Sybil-has two layers of symbolic significance: the story that Seymour tells about the fish is a metaphor for the destruction caused by war and by hyper-materialistic culture.
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