A Perfect Day for Bananafish by J. D. Salinger

First published: 1948

Type of plot: Psychological

Time of work: 1948

Locale: South Florida

Principal Characters:

• Seymour Glass, a psychologically disturbed army veteran
• Muriel Glass, his wife
• Muriel's mother, unnamed
• Dr. Rieser, a psychiatrist
• Sybil Carpenter, a child four or five years old
• Mrs. Carpenter, her mother

The Story

"A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is composed of three interconnected story lines, the first and third of them realistic, the second a kind of fantasy. As the story opens, Muriel Glass is alone in her hotel room, presumably in Miami Beach, waiting for her call to her mother to be put through. She is polishing her fingernails when the telephone rings, but she does not drop everything to answer it. She replaces the cap of her nail polish, gets an ash tray, sits down on one of the twin beds, and answers the telephone on the fifth or sixth ring.

Muriel's mother, talking from a northern city, is worried at not having heard from Muriel sooner. As the conversation progresses, it becomes increasingly evident that something is seriously wrong with Seymour, Muriel's husband, who had been mustered out of the army after World War II and who has been hospitalized up until now. Muriel has waited for him through the war and during the time he was hospitalized.

Muriel's mother is particularly distressed to learn that Muriel allowed Seymour to drive the car on their trip to Florida. He has already damaged Muriel's father's car by driving it into a tree, which he seems to have a compulsion to do. The mother urges her daughter to come home at once. She tells Muriel that her father will pay for her to take a trip away by herself to think things out. Muriel mentions that she met the hotel's psychiatrist, Dr. Rieser, who asked her if her husband, who looks wan and pale, is ill.

Muriel also asks if her mother knows where a book of German poetry is that Seymour sent her from Germany. Seymour considers the poems to be by the only great poet of the century, presumably Rainer Maria Rilke, and wants Muriel to learn German so that she can read them. Muriel tells her mother that Seymour is now by himself on the beach, where he refuses to take off his terry cloth robe because he does not want people to stare at his tattoo. Her mother says, "He doesn't have any tattoo! Did he get one in the army?" Muriel assures her that he did not.

The scene shifts to a beach, where little Sybil Carpenter is talking with her mother, who is about to go off to have a martini with a friend. She tells Sybil to go and play, and she promises to save her the olive from her drink. Sybil walks a quarter of a mile down the beach, where she finds her friend Seymour Glass. She is petulant because she has heard that he let another little girl sit on his bench when he was playing the piano in one of the hotel's public rooms. As the two go to the water, Seymour suggests that perhaps they can catch a bananafish. He tells Sybil that it is a perfect day for bananafish. Seymour pushes her out almost too far on a rubber raft, and she makes him take her back to shore. On the way, he tells her that bananafish swim into holes where there are bananas and stuff themselves on them, sometimes eating as many as seventy-eight at a time. This makes them so fat, naturally, that they cannot get out of the hole, and they die there. Sybil tells Seymour that she has just seen a bananafish.

The final scene of the story has two parts. In the first, Seymour gets into the hotel elevator, and when it starts to move, he accuses a woman with zinc salve on her nose, someone whom he does not know, of staring at his feet. She says that she is merely looking at the floor, but Seymour continues making his accusation volubly to the point that she becomes flustered and asks the elevator operator to let her out at the next floor.

Seymour leaves the elevator when it gets to his floor and goes to his and Muriel's room. Muriel is asleep in her bed. He goes to his suitcase, takes an Ortiges calibre 7.65 automatic revolver from it, sits down on his bed, looks at Muriel, then puts a bullet through his right temple.

Bibliography

Alexander, Paul. Salinger: A Biography. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999.

Alsen, Eberhard. A Reader's Guide to J. D. Salinger. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Belcher, William F., and James W. Lee, eds. J. D. Salinger and the Critics. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1962.

French, Warren T. J. D. Salinger. Rev. ed. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976.

Hamilton, Ian. In Search of J. D. Salinger. New York: Random House, 1988.

Kotzen, Kip, and Thomas Beller, eds. With Love and Squalor: Fourteen Writers Respond to the Work of J. D. Salinger. New York: Broadway Books, 2001.

Lundquist, James. J. D. Salinger. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979.

Steinle, Pamela Hunt. In Cold Fear: "The Catcher in the Rye" Censorship Controversies and Postwar American Character. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000.

Sublette, Jack R. J. D. Salinger: An Annotated Bibliography, 1938-1981. New York: Garland, 1984.