But if she is the bananafish, so is Seymour: he has been squeezed through the hole and is unable to make his way out again. Observe how Seymour initially mistakes Sybil’s yellow bathing suit for a blue one, mirroring his own royal blue shorts.īut the yellow bananafish also recalls the yellow bathing suit Sibyl is wearing: ‘bananafish’ thus combines her yellow attire with her proximity to the sea.
WAR OF BEACH CHARECTORS FULL
This apparently nonsensical statement chimes with Seymour’s own attitude concerning the fictional ‘bananafish’, a creature reminiscent of children’s nonsense literature which he uses as a device to bond with Sybil in ways he cannot bond, in the adult world, with his own wife, with whom he can only now, it would seem, communicate in any meaningful sense in a language she literally cannot understand (that book of German poems).Īnd in other respects, there is a suggestion that Seymour views Sybil as a kind of mirror or reflection of himself: hence the punning potential of his full name which she liberates, ‘see more glass’, because he can see more of himself in the looking-glass that she represents than he can with anyone else, including his wife (whose name, Muriel, means ‘sparkling or shining sea’: an ironic touch given that she is the one person out of the three of them who doesn’t join them in the water: hers is one watery mirror in which he cannot locate himself). In this connection, Sybil’s breaking down of Seymour Glass’s name into three distinct syllables (sibylline syllables?) – ‘see more glass’ – is both a child’s immature play with the inherent but meaningless puns hiding within language and, at the same time, an almost metatextual revealing of Salinger’s own writerly technique: clearly he intends us, like Sybil, to liberate this cryptic statement from Seymour’s name as well.
There is something deeply Romantic, in the Wordsworthian sense, about Salinger’s view of children and childhood. We might recall, in Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield’s disgust, when he visits his younger sister Phoebe’s school to say goodbye, upon finding that a swearword has been scrawled on the walls, corrupting the innocence of childhood.įor Holden, many adults are ‘phonies’ and childhood is a pure state which we leave behind at our peril, for then we are truly lost. Salinger’s story is similarly full of elliptical statements and exchanges (‘elliptical’ meaning that parts of the meaning are left out, leaving us to deduce the full meaning for ourselves).īut how sibylline is Sibyl? Salinger’s child-characters are often the wisest, while the adults are too corrupted by the weight of the world and the realities of day-to-day living to be in touch with the true meaning of life. He tells Percy that hes messing up his strategy for igniting a war: Percy. Indeed, the one character in ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ who seems to understand Seymour is the child, Sybil, whose very name summons the prophetesses of Greek mythology who made elliptical, but wise, pronouncements by scattering fragments of their prophecies which those who consulted them had to piece together themselves to discover their (potential) meanings. They stumble onto the Santa Monica Beach at sunrise, while Los Angeles burns.
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