![]() ![]() Seymour opens a piece of luggage, takes out an Ortgies caliber 7.65 from underneath a pile of clothes, and fires “a bullet through his right temple.” There Muriel is lying on the bed, asleep. When he reaches the fifth floor, he gets out and enters Room 507. “But don’t be a God-damned sneak about it.” “If you want to look at my feet, say so,” Seymour snaps back. “I happened to be looking at the floor,” the woman says. Seymour returns to the hotel, and confronts a woman in the elevator for apparently having looked at his feet. Shortly thereafter, Sybil and Seymour get out of the water and part ways. Soon Sybil reports: “I just saw one.” Seymour plays along, asks how many bananas the fish had in his mouth. “They lead a very tragic life,” Seymour says. The result: they grow too fat to escape from the hole. While perfectly normal fish before entering the holes, once inside the bananafish become ravenous and devour all the bananas they can spot. Seymour explains that bananafish have a tendency to swim into holes filled with bananas. ![]() “This is a perfect day for bananafish,” Seymour notes as he carries Sybil on a rubber float into the water, advising her to keep her eyes peeled for any of them. They talk about another girl at the hotel, Sharon Lipschutz, about the necessity of “olives and wax” to everyday life, and about this strange creature Seymour has mentioned – the bananafish. Seymour is joking and jovial, and soon he rises to his feet and says they should go try to catch “a bananafish.” He removes his robe and walks with Sybil into the water. The young man and girl talk, and there is an easy rapport between them. “If there’s one thing I like, it’s a blue bathing suit,” he says. The two have spoken before.Īfter explaining that he was waiting to go in the water with Sybil, Seymour remarks on the girl’s fine bathing suit. She asks him if he is returning to the water, to “see more glass”. He is lying on his back, wrapped in the bathrobe, squinting in the sunlight. She is staying at the hotel with her mother, and is scurrying across the beach when she happens upon Seymour. Next, we meet a young girl named Sybil Carpenter. We learn that Seymour is currently lying on the beach and won’t take his bathrobe off, explaining that he doesn’t want people seeing his “tattoo” (when, in fact, as Muriel and her mother both know, he doesn’t have a tattoo). “When I think of how you waited for that boy all through the war,” the mother replies. “You could take a lovely cruise.” Muriel refuses. “Your father said last night that he’d be more than willing to pay for it if you’d go away someplace by yourself and think things over,” she says. The conversation ends with the mother again pleading to her daughter to come home and perhaps reconsider things. Still, Muriel seems decidedly unconcerned, and she grows more and more irritated with her mother’s agitation. It seems that even then Seymour’s behavior – and particularly his pale countenance – were enough to elicit concern. Sivetski about Seymour and was told “it was a perfect crime the Army released him from the hospital.” She urges Muriel to come home immediately, but Muriel will have nothing of it: “This is the first vacation I’ve had in years, and I’m not going to pack everything and come home,” she tells her mother.Īs the conversation continues, we learn that a psychiatrist in the hotel has actually spoken to Muriel about Seymour, after having noticed him playing piano in the hotel bar. We learn that Seymour calls Muriel “Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948”, that he sent her a book of poems from Germany by “ the only great poet of the century” in his view, that he said “horrible things” to Muriel’s grandmother about her “plans for passing away.” Muriel’s mother tells Muriel that her father spoke to Dr. Learning Seymour did the driving, she exclaims: “ He drove? Did he try any of that funny business with the trees?” As the conversation continues, it quickly becomes clear that Muriel’s mother and father have grave doubts about the mental stability of their son-in-law. She starts off by asking why Muriel hasn’t phoned earlier, and then demands to know who drove to the hotel. ![]() “I’ve been worried to death about you,” the mother says. She finishes lacquering a fingernail before picking the phone up she is “a girl who for a ringing dropped exactly nothing.” She is sitting in her hotel room – Room 507 – reading a “women’s pocket-size magazine, called ‘Sex is Fun – Or Hell’, and moving the button on her Saks blouse, when the long-distance call she has put through to New York finally comes through. Salinger’s Nine Stories, begins with a woman named Muriel Glass, wife of Seymour Glass (of Salinger’s famed Glass family), who is on vacation at a Florida beach resort with Seymour. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” the first story in J. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |