Word: bananafish
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...what Salinger has evidently been trying to do for the past ten years is to justify writing stories with his peculiar style Zoocy was an attempt to legitimize Franny, and Seymour did its best to rescue A perfect Day for Bananafish. But the lasting impression is that Salinger has lost control of his style, and that the style is writing his stories...
...evolution of Seymour into this being of almost supersensory perception is one of the more fascinating parts of J. D. Salinger's history. Seymour first appeared in the limpid, shattering, 1948 short story, A Perfect Day for Bananafish, in which he goes swimming with a little girl on a Florida beach and, overcome by her innocence, swallows too much sublimity (or, one guesses later, too much despair). He returns to his hotel room, where his wife has been gabbling on the phone to her mother, and shoots himself through the head. Reasons for the cryptic suicide were suggested...
...exception to this is "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," a story Salinger should have finished just one sentence from the end. After creating a tense picture of a sensitive man close to insanity, spending an afternoon raving to a little girl, Salinger glues on a suicide ending which seems...
...Perfect Day for Bananafish" is an example of Salinger at his slickest, there are two bed time tales in the collection that should be rated in the short story field just about where Charles Addams' work ranks in the realm of cartoons. The main difference between Salinger and Addams, however, is that it's difficult to laugh off Salinger's stories. The characters are all people we might know, not ghouls. "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" shows a malformed little girl wandering about in dreams of terrible unreality while her mother and a friend get drunker and drunker in the next...