You'll notice, for instance, that Seymour grabs Sybil's ankles when he is lying on the beach, then again when he pushes her along the water. ![]() Yup, all that befriending and swimming and story-telling is just his way of getting close to little girls. OR, perhaps Seymour's suicide is a way of overcoming the material world: by leaving it altogether. This of course begs the question, what does Seymour's suicide mean? Is going back to his fancy-shmancy hotel room and killing himself the human equivalent of diving into a banana hole and eating to death? That might explain why Sybil thinks she sees a bananafish - she could be talking about Seymour. According to some, this is Seymour's unorthodox but fitting metaphor for the materialistic consumer mentality of post-WWII American society - not that we'd know anything about that nowadays. In the description he gives to Sybil, bananafish are fish that swim into holes and gorge on so many bananas that they get stuck and die. There are three leading theories on the matter. People can't seem to agree on what the guy is like, why he's always hanging out with little kids, or, most importantly, why he decides to kill himself. Seymour Glass, or, as Sybil calls him, "see more glass," is a hotly contested short story character in American literature - which gives his oh-so transparent name all the more irony. From there, we head to the beach, where Seymour is hanging out with a four-ish-year old girl named Sybil and telling her stories about the elusive "bananafish." The story ends with Seymour returning to his hotel room and shooting himself in the head. The story starts in a posh seaside hotel room, where we overhear Glass's wife on the phone with her mother discussing Seymour's mental health. Salinger's 1951 classic short story, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," introduces Salinger's favorite character, Seymour Glass - only to kill him some several pages later. He takes a gun from his suitcase, sits on the other bed, and fires a bullet through his temple.J.D. Seymour makes it to his hotel room, where Muriel is asleep on one of the twin beds. In the elevator, he accuses an adult woman of looking at his feet. Once they've parted ways, Seymour plods along back to the hotel. Seymour then kisses her foot and says it's time to go back. Sybil, playing along, exclaims that she's seen a bananafish with six bananas in its mouth. Then they're too fat to get back out again and they die. They're normal little fish, he says, until they swim into a banana hole and gorge themselves on bananas. The two of them head into the ocean together, and Seymour explains to Sybil all about bananafish. Seymour is obviously wonderful with children he jokes around with Sybil, and she's clearly enamored with him. Sybil runs to a deserted part of the beach to find Seymour, with whom she's apparently struck up a friendship during her stay at the hotel. Carpenter lets the little girl run off to play. ![]() "See more glass," the girl keeps repeating, though her mother has no idea what that means. The second scene takes place on the beach outside the hotel, where a little girl named Sybil Carpenter waits while her mother puts sun block on her back. But Muriel doesn't seem to be taking the issue very seriously at all. Muriel's mother is scared for her daughter and wants her to come home. He's mentally unstable, and seemingly incapable of functioning normally in a social environment. It seems that, since getting back from the war (WWII), Seymour just hasn't been the same. Muriel is on the phone with her mother, discussing Seymour. ![]() The first scene features Muriel Glass, a young woman who has been married for five years to Seymour Glass. "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" takes place at a resort hotel in Florida in 1948.
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