In 1945, Salinger suffered some sort of breakdown or illness as a result of the war (the details are unclear) and spent some time at an Army hospital in Nuremberg. Salinger served with the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps before participating in the 1944 DDay invasion, where he landed at Utah Beach. Salinger then sold a number of stories (many now uncollected) to magazines such as Collier's, the Saturday Evening Post and Esquire before he was drafted by the United States Army in 1942. The following year, he took a course at Columbia University taught by Whit Burnett, the editor of Story magazine Salinger's first piece of fiction, "The Young Folks," impressed Burnett, who published it in a 1940 issue of Story. After only one semester, however, he dropped out. His failing grades, however, prompted his parents to send him (in 1934) to Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, where he edited his class's yearbook and from which he graduated in 1936.Īfter a brief tour of Europe, Salinger enrolled in Ursinus College in the fall of 1938. In 1932, the family moved to Park Avenue (as a result of Solomon's success) and Salinger was enrolled at the McBurney School, a private school in Manhattan where he (like his most famous creation, Holden Caulfield) managed the fencing team, wrote for the school newspaper and acted in some drama productions. His father, Solomon, was a Jewish cheese importer who hoped that his son would eventually learn his business his mother, Marie Jillich, was an Irish Catholic whose parents disowned her when she eloped with Solomon. Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City on New Year's Day, 1919. Regardless of what specific motive a reader assigns to Seymour's suicide, he or she is sure to be involved in Salinger's elaborate game of symbols, colors, and other indirect means of storytelling.
#A perfect day for bananafish symbols professional#
Multiple interpretations are possible, which makes the story's meaning ripe for debate, a much-disputed point for both professional critics and casual fans.
Also plausible is the idea that Seymour is like the bananafish he describes: a man so glutted (with horror or pleasure) that he can no longer survive. Others view Seymour as something of a guru, a man wise enough to know that his world can only corrupt him and who, therefore, escapes from it. Some readers find Seymour's wife, Muriel, partially to blame, as her self-interest seems to overshadow what should be her wifely concern for her troubled husband. This apparent lack of motive is at the heart of the critical debate on the story. However, his suicide in the story's final paragraph shocks most readers and then leaves them scratching their heads, trying to understand why, exactly, Seymour pulled the trigger. The reader of "Bananafish" learns that Seymour, a veteran of World War II, has had trouble readjusting to civilian life-an understandable problem that thousands of soldiers had to face.
Seymour, the oldest of the Glass children, is Salinger's main character in one of his most elusive pieces of writing. The story is the first concerning a member of the fictional Glass family Salinger created, whose members figure in much of his work. "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" first appeared in the January 31, 1948, issue of the New Yorker and was collected as the first piece in Nine Stories (1953). The concentrated, tasteful framing of situations, objects and characters is a bit distracting: the cleanly bisected cemetery where Nate first arrives in his car the careful display of household goods tied to the back of Herman’s truck.A Perfect Day for Bananafish Introduction Handsomely shot in black and white by Alfonso Herrera Salcedo, the screen appears in a deliberately cramped 4:3 ratio, shading with irony the wide expanses of terrain and jagged rises. The overt literariness hinders some of the visual pleasures on show. One character’s apparent loathing of Christmas acutely indicates the film’s explicit reckoning with signs and symbols. The dialogue between the pair is studied in its inarticulacy, which insinuates a form of authentic portrayal but is in fact novelistic: Rutherford’s screenplay is pockmarked with call-back images (cigarettes) and thematic motifs (alcoholism). By revelation or serendipity, Nate suddenly calls to reconnect, setting in motion a subsequent two-hander of “remember when,” held across a sprawling backdrop of Oregon hills, peaks and plains (the exact location is not directly named, and both Herman and Nate only vaguely suggest that they are from “around” the place). Berrier is a strong and thoughtful performer, and his solo scenes constitute the film’s most affecting sequences. It is a pained soliloquy: a set of halting laments and self-justifications. The extended open begins with a middle-aged man, Herman (Jeb Berrier), balding but otherwise hirsute, sitting in his pick-up truck, recording a note for his estranged son, Nate (Charlie Plummer).
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