J. D. Salinger: Seeing the Glass Family (A Perfect Day For Bananafish)

In 1948, J.D. Salinger published the short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” in the New Yorker. This event was a major step in his literary career. First, it brought Salinger serious critical acclaim. Second, it established a working relationship between the author and The New Yorker. The magazine offered Salinger a right of first refusal contract, and he subsequently published his new work almost exclusively in the New Yorker. Third, it marks the first published appearance of Seymour Glass, the oldest sibling in the Glass family. Salinger would go on to chronicle the lives of the Glass family siblings in a series of short stories and novellas.

“Bananafish” is the only story in which Seymour appears in real time. In all the other stories he is either referred to, or described from a distance in time. Nevertheless, the spirit of Seymour pervades all of the stories, and is a constant presence in the thoughts of his younger brothers and sisters.

The “Bananafish” story (which became the opening story in Salinger’s beloved collection Nine Stories) is a masterpiece of economy and style. Using mostly dialog to set the scene and give background on the main characters, Salinger presents the barest of facts, describes a series of events, and then lets the reader puzzle out the meaning and fill in his or her own perception of the characters. Salinger at this point in his life was a student of Zen Buddhism, and “Bananafish” is similar to a Zen koan, or riddle, in which a question is posed and the answer is found through meditation and self-examination.


“Bananafish” opens in a hotel in Florida in 1948. Muriel, Seymour’s wife, is talking to her mother on the phone. We learn that Muriel is basically a shallow, self-absorbed woman who does her nails and glances through a woman’s magazine while waiting for her call to her mother to go through. In the conversation, we learn that Seymour has been behaving rather strangely since he returned from the war. We hear allusions to a car accident, to odd behavior towards Muriel’s family, and we also learn that Seymour was in an army hospital before coming home. Muriel tells her mother that she tried to talk with a psychiatrist who is staying at the hotel about Seymour’s problems.

The action of the story then moves to the beach. A young child named Sybil Carpenter is on the beach with her mother. The mother lets Sybil run off and play while she heads up to the hotel to have a cocktail with a friend. Sybil runs down the beach to find “see more glass”.

Seymour Glass is revealed to be a pale young man wearing a terry cloth robe and lying on the beach. Sybil asks him where the lady is. Seymour replies that Muriel is “At the hairdresser’s. Having her hair dyed mink.” The two have a discussion about Sharon Lipschutz, another little girl who Seymour had let sit on the piano bench while he played in the Ocean Room at the hotel.

Then Seymour and Sybil go into the water. Seymour has an inflatable raft, and when the water gets up to Sybil’s waist, he put her on the raft, on her stomach. Seymour tells Sybil about bananafish: “they swim into a hole where there’s a lot of bananas. They’re very ordinary-looking fish when they swim in. But once they get in, they behave like pigs. Why, I’ve known some bananafish to swim into a banana hole and eat as many as seventy-eight bananas. “ Seymour explains that after they eat so many bananas, they can’t get out of the hole. They get banana fever and die.

Sybil then says she sees a bananafish with six bananas in its mouth. Seymour kisses the bottom of her foot, and then pushes the raft and Sybil back to shore. Sybil runs off down the beach, and Seymour goes back to the hotel. On the elevator ride up to his room, he accuses a woman passenger of looking at his feet. He says “If you want to look at my feet, say so … But don’t be a God-damned sneak about it.”

Seymour lets himself into the hotel room, which smells of “new calfskin luggage and nail-lacquer remover.” Muriel is sleeping on one of the twin beds. He takes a Ortgies 7.65 caliber automatic from his bag, sits down on the unoccupied bed, and shoots himself through the right temple.

Thus the story is laid out before us, and we need to solve the koan, the puzzle. Why did Seymour Glass kill himself? We know that he was discharged from an Army hospital, that he has been behaving strangely. His behavior on the beach didn’t seem too abnormal, although wearing a terry-cloth robe on the hot beach in Florida seems a bit odd. The bananafish story could just be the type of thing that an adult makes up to amuse a child, except for the way the bananafish die.

Seymour’s violent outburst against the woman in the hotel elevator, though, suggests that he may be deeply disturbed. The abrupt, unexpected suicide is shocking and final. And now that the story is over, we start to reflect back on the events we have just read.

A clearer picture of Seymour Glass emerges. He has returned from the war with what we now call post-traumatic stress. We know from Muriel’s conversation with her mother that he spends the evenings playing the piano in the Ocean Room rather than mingling with the other guests. He is more comfortable with little children than he is with adults.

The bananafish story, on reflection, is a metaphor for the post-war American consumer society. Seymour has returned from a Europe devastated by World War II to an America where people express an unbridled materialism. Their appetite for material possessions is insatiable, like that of the bananafish for bananas. Ultimately, this appetite is fatal, if only for the spirit.

We now see how deeply disturbed and depressed Seymour really was. Returning from the war badly shaken by his experience there, he is thrust into a superficial society that glories in materialism. His wife is more interested in “dying her hair mink” than making a serious attempt to read a book of German poems that he has given her. He despairs at the life ahead of him, and pulls the trigger.

Salinger was a master of the taut, enigmatic short story. He gives us just enough information to form a lasting impression of his characters, an impression more vivid than if he had described them from head to toe in extreme detail.

Two more short stories involving members of the Glass family followed “Bananafish”. Also published in 1948, “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut” reveals that Walt Glass, whose twin brother is Waker, was killed in a freak, non-combat, accident in Japan during the War. This story was made into a film, My Foolish Heart, though this was a complete bastardization of Salinger’s story. The experience so embittered the writer against Hollywood that he never again authorized film adaptations of his work.

In 1949, the story “Down at the Dinghy” was published. This story introduces us to Seymour’s oldest sister, Boo Boo, who is married and living in New York, with a summer home on a lake. During the course of the story, Boo Boo’s son Lionel drops his uncle Seymour’s swimming goggles into the lake.

More in-depth explorations of the Glass family followed these stories. In all, there were seven children in the Glass family, and starting in the mid-1950s with the publication of the short story “Franny”, all of Salinger’s published efforts were stories chronicling this large and eccentric group.

Artwork by David Richardson.

14 Responses

  1. That’s an amazing review. I
    That’s an amazing review. I read A Perfect Day for Bananafish years ago and didn’t catch the meaning of the bananafish story. Now I need to go back an re-read it.

    And the rest of the Glass Family portraits are amazing. Walter & Waker, and that first portrait of Seymour are exactly how I imagined them. Absolutely perfect!

  2. I agree about the consumerism
    I agree about the consumerism vs spiritualism theme – though this is more prominent in ‘Franny and Zooey’ where both characters represent the flipside of the struggle between image (or how we present ourselves to society) and self (one’s inner nature) – Franny wanting to be pure self (the Jesus Prayer, quitting the theatre), hence rejecting society; Zooey wanting to be pure image (as shown by the meticulous grooming routine, his self-loathing at not being able to engage with the dense people in show business), hence hating his religious upbringing – so its odd that this major theme wasnt really discussed in the post on that book.

    With Seymour’s story I think its more important to contextualise it within all the other Glass stories in which he is referred to. It seems implied from ‘Raise High the Roof Beam’ that Seymour himself is the bananafish, and his bananas are bites of happiness. Seymour, with all the same religious education he had pushed onto Zooey, can’t seem to handle being truly happy, or being part of a normal well-adjusted society (a lot like Zooey, really) hence when he meets the simple Muriel he feels he is a ‘paranoiac in reverse’ convinced people are plotting to make him happy, as he writes in his diary, or a ‘bananafish’ whose gauging on happiness will only kill him.

    Also, I think the reaction of Seymour to the woman looking at his feet should be linked to Sybil’s annoyance at Seymour kissing her foot after she pretends to spot some bananafish herself. I’ve never been sure what the link is, though. Maybe just as Sybil has seen the bananafish, the elevator incident tells us that Seymour has seen how it must all end, with him being a bananafish himself after all.

  3. Perhaps my favorite anecdote
    Perhaps my favorite anecdote regarding “Bananafish” involves The New Yorker’s initial reaction to it. The magazine’s editors (William Maxwell in particular) were intrigued by the submission but reported back to Salinger that it seemed to lack “any discoverable story or point”. Salinger then revised the piece repeatedly over the following year, clarifying the story until it met with New Yorker standards.

    I find that amusing. Considering the evasive character of the redacted version we have now, one can only imagine how indecipherable Salinger’s original version must have been.

    Thank you for this series and for this interesting reflection. Special kudos are due to the artist with his fine eye for detail (are they Lucky Strikes sitting next to Franny at Sickler’s?) who has skillfully captured the essence of the author within his characters. I look forward to the next installment.

    Thanks, guys.

  4. I could not find the name of
    I could not find the name of the painter who did those portraits.
    How come?
    That’s a real pity; this article has been up for 5 years.
    ??

  5. Thanks for mentioning that
    Thanks for mentioning that oversight, Ana – we’ve now restored the artist’s name and link. The artist is David Richardson.

  6. Thank you very much, Levi. I
    Thank you very much, Levi. I am sorry it has taken me so long to come back here. I did not expect anyone to answer, seeing the post is from 2011 — and now I am a little surprised at the artist’s name, for it must be hard to remember and to recall ….

    It is an incredibly good painting, almost too good, for it makes me see Salinger in Richardson’s terms. I wonder. It doesn’t however show how Salinger could break out of his first language, Holden’s language with its glorious openness towards a bored face world.

    And, would Mr Richardson not have considered how Salinger invents any number of names and each sticks? I talked to othr people about this novel and mention Phoebe, Holden, Franny, and everybody remembers them by their names.

    a.

    Postscript
    I am now looking into the German versions of this story and why it doesn’t work. It isn’t just the translators.

  7. So I got the wrong Richardson
    So I got the wrong Richardson, but I don’t know anything about painting, can’t tell good from bad, and yet, because of the subject matter rather than the quality of the pictures I had my doubts. He is a US army man and “does” birds, ducks, fish, but not people. I didn’t know that Richardson is a frequent name.
    Then I discovered the Proust collection. Imagine!

  8. It’s been more that a year
    It’s been more that a year since this comment but the artist’s name is David Wesley Richardson

  9. I always thought that Seymour
    I always thought that Seymour himself was the Bananafish, and that what he ate, what caused him to despair, was the knowledge of human nature.

    From Wikipedia:
    Like the eldest son of the Glass family, Salinger was deeply affected by his experiences as a combat soldier in WWII, and these informed his writing.[11] Kenneth Slawenski reports that Salinger, in his Seymour – An Introduction (1959), confesses that the young man in Bananafish “was not Seymour at all but… myself.”[10] Traumatized by the Battle of the Bulge and the Nazi concentration camps,[12] Salinger “found it impossible to fit into a society that ignored the truth that he now knew.”

  10. Has anyone ever written,
    Has anyone ever written, observed, or otherwise commented on the numerology that informs the Glass Family Saga? Limiting the scope to the surface of the “Bananafish” episode, the name Seymour Glass is comprised of 12 letters (a fatidic number of course), configured 7+5. Have a look at the number of the hotel room. With Seymour’s suicide and Walt’s death in a freak accident, the number of Glass children, once 7, is now 5. There’s a lot more but since I’ve been out of the lit biz, Salinger subdivision, for a long while, I have no idea if anyone else or even a dinghy-load of people have been in on this. Please advise.

  11. He commits suicide because he came close to exposing himself, underwater, to the girl.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

What we're up to ...

Litkicks is 26 years old! This website has been on a long and wonderful journey since 1994. We’re relaunching the whole site on a new platform in June 2021, and will have more updates soon. We’ve also been busy producing a couple of podcasts – please check them out.

World BEYOND War: A New Podcast
Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera

Explore related articles ...