a perfect day for bananafish analysis essay

A Summary and Analysis of J. D. Salinger’s ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ is one of J. D. Salinger’s best-known and most widely studied short stories. First published in the New Yorker in 1948, the story is a masterclass in how to reveal both character and plot through elliptical and suggestive dialogue, with the ‘action’ largely focusing on two scenes: one in a hotel room and the other on a beach. These two scenes are then brought together for the story’s tragic denouement.

Among other things, ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ is a powerful depiction of alienation in the immediate post-war world of the late 1940s. The story is about a man, Seymour, who has returned from the war and feels disconnected from the world around him, including his wife.

‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’: plot summary

On a hot day in Florida, a young married woman named Muriel talks on the telephone to her mother. She is discussing her husband Seymour, who has become withdrawn since getting back from the war. We learn that Muriel and Seymour have gone to Florida on holiday.

Muriel’s mother is concerned by the fact that Seymour drove himself and his wife there in his unstable mental state. Indeed, Muriel’s mother believes the army should never have released Seymour from the army hospital because he is in danger of completely losing control. We learn that Seymour has recently crashed his father-in-law’s car. However, Muriel insists to her mother that Seymour is fine. Seymour has also asked Muriel to learn German, so she can read the German poems he sent her when he was stationed in Germany during the war. These poems, he claimed, were written by the greatest poet of the century.

Muriel tells her mother that a psychiatrist staying in the hotel had asked her the night before if her husband was all right, presumably because he looks so pale and unwell.

While Muriel and her mother talk over the phone, Seymour walks along the beach, where he meets Sybil, a young child who is staying in the same hotel as him. They talk in a way that is more suggestive of two adults flirting than a grown man and a young girl conversing, with Sybil implying that she is jealous that Seymour let another girl, Sharon Lipschutz, sit next to him as he played the piano in the hotel.

Seymour finally removes his robe, and goes down to the water with Sybil, pushing her out to sea on a float. He tells her about the bananafish, a greedy fish which feeds on bananas by squeezing into holes filled with them. This strange fish then gorges on the fruit, becoming trapped because it’s too fat to squeeze back out the hole again. The creature subsequently dies of banana fever. Sybil goes along with this tall tale, and even claims to have seen a bananafish in the water, with six bananas in its mouth.

Seymour gets back to the hotel, causing a scene in the elevator where he accuses a woman of looking at his feet. He arrives at his room where his wife is asleep, takes out a gun from his luggage, and shoots himself in the head.

‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’: analysis

‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ has been compared to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway : another post-war fiction which focuses (in one of its plotlines or character arcs) on a soldier who has recently returned from the war and who struggles to adjust to post-war life.

Seymour Glass is Salinger’s own version of Septimus Smith, Woolf’s shell-shocked First World War veteran whose patient wife Lucrezia feels powerless to help her troubled husband, much as Muriel feels unable (though willing) to help Seymour. (Oddly enough, Seymour’s statement about Sharon Lipschutz, ‘mixing memory and desire’, is an allusion to another post-WWI modernist work which features shell-shocked soldiers: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land .)

It is clear that Muriel’s mother is concerned for her daughter’s safety when in the company of her husband, and it’s also clear that Seymour has been acting erratically and even dangerously (such as crashing his father-in-law’s car). He also refuses to take his bathrobe off because he doesn’t want anyone to see his tattoo – even though, according to Muriel, he doesn’t have a tattoo.

He is evidently scarred by his war experiences. But it is Sybil for whom he takes off his robe, partly, perhaps, because such an act has none of the adult connotations it carries with his wife (with whom he is expected to perform his marital duties) and is instead a regression to childhood.

With this in mind, we might also compare ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ with another post-war story, albeit one that is, like Mrs Dalloway , about the aftermath of the First World War rather than the second. Ernest Hemingway’s 1925 story ‘ Soldier’s Home ’, in which a young man named Harold Krebs returns from fighting in the First World War and can no longer relate to the people in his hometown in Oklahoma.

The alienation of the war-scarred male character is not the only thing which unites these two stories: Seymour’s playful conversation (indeed, borderline flirtation) with Sybil recalls Krebs’ relationship with his younger sister (where he talks to her as though they are courting boyfriend and girlfriend rather than sisters).

Both male protagonists can only truly relate to women – or rather, girls – who are much younger than they are, and who are, indeed, still children. It is not that the adult males in either story wish to objectify the girls: indeed, the point is that the men are themselves children, who have retreated back into childhood to avoid the unbearable strain of adult life.

Indeed, the one character in ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ who seems to understand Seymour is the child, Sybil, whose very name summons the prophetesses of Greek mythology who made elliptical, but wise, pronouncements by scattering fragments of their prophecies which those who consulted them had to piece together themselves to discover their (potential) meanings. Salinger’s story is similarly full of elliptical statements and exchanges (‘elliptical’ meaning that parts of the meaning are left out, leaving us to deduce the full meaning for ourselves).

But how sibylline is Sibyl? Salinger’s child-characters are often the wisest, while the adults are too corrupted by the weight of the world and the realities of day-to-day living to be in touch with the true meaning of life. We might recall, in Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye , Holden Caulfield’s disgust , when he visits his younger sister Phoebe’s school to say goodbye, upon finding that a swearword has been scrawled on the walls, corrupting the innocence of childhood.

For Holden, many adults are ‘phonies’ and childhood is a pure state which we leave behind at our peril, for then we are truly lost. There is something deeply Romantic, in the Wordsworthian sense, about Salinger’s view of children and childhood.

In this connection, Sybil’s breaking down of Seymour Glass’s name into three distinct syllables (sibylline syllables?) – ‘see more glass’ – is both a child’s immature play with the inherent but meaningless puns hiding within language and, at the same time, an almost metatextual revealing of Salinger’s own writerly technique: clearly he intends us , like Sybil, to liberate this cryptic statement from Seymour’s name as well.

This apparently nonsensical statement chimes with Seymour’s own attitude concerning the fictional ‘bananafish’, a creature reminiscent of children’s nonsense literature which he uses as a device to bond with Sybil in ways he cannot bond, in the adult world, with his own wife, with whom he can only now, it would seem, communicate in any meaningful sense in a language she literally cannot understand (that book of German poems).

And in other respects, there is a suggestion that Seymour views Sybil as a kind of mirror or reflection of himself: hence the punning potential of his full name which she liberates, ‘see more glass’, because he can see more of himself in the looking-glass that she represents than he can with anyone else, including his wife (whose name, Muriel, means ‘sparkling or shining sea’: an ironic touch given that she is the one person out of the three of them who doesn’t join them in the water: hers is one watery mirror in which he cannot locate himself). Observe how Seymour initially mistakes Sybil’s yellow bathing suit for a blue one, mirroring his own royal blue shorts.

But the yellow bananafish also recalls the yellow bathing suit Sibyl is wearing: ‘bananafish’ thus combines her yellow attire with her proximity to the sea. But if she is the bananafish, so is Seymour: he has been squeezed through the hole and is unable to make his way out again. For ‘banana fever’, read PTSD following his war experiences.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of J. D. Salinger’s A Perfect Day for Bananafish

Analysis of J. D. Salinger’s A Perfect Day for Bananafish

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on June 8, 2021

First published in the New Yorker on January 31, 1948, and later the first story in the 1953 collection Nine Stories , “ A Perfect Day for Bananafish ” begins with Muriel Glass sitting in a Florida hotel room fielding a telephone call from her overconcerned mother. As is typical of J. D. Salinger’s work, dialogue between characters moves the plot forward; the speech is sufficiently vague to leave the reader interested in what the characters refer to but never explain. Salinger spends little time describing a particular scene, preferring to let the character’s words set the pace as well as the mood of a work.

The first section of the story revolves around Muriel and her mother’s conversation, with elliptical references to German books, the war, and Muriel’s terribly pale husband, Seymour, who has yet to enter the story. It is implied that the war, World War II, has set Seymour on edge, although Muriel reassures her mother that he is fine. The story implies that the reader should doubt Muriel’s assertion.

Seymour is introduced to the story through Sybil, a young child who, with her mother, is staying at the same hotel. Sybil recognizes “see more glass” on the beach after she is sent away by her mother ( Nine Stories 10). Seymour and Sybil enter the water, Sybil on a small fl oat and Seymour simply standing in the water, making elliptical small talk. He tells Sybil about strange creatures called bananafish. Bananafish, Seymour explains, are perfectly normal until one swims into a hole filled with bananas. The perhaps-lucky bananafish then overeats until it is too stuffed to swim back out of the hole, eventually dying of banana fever. Sybil, as a typical Salingerian wide-eyed child, plays along with Seymour’s game, claiming to see one eating six bananas at once.

As in many of Salinger’s other works, the wisest words emerge from the mouths of children. The adults in this story, beaten down and resigned to their lives, either send their children to play on the beach or fend off their mothers on hotel room telephones. Sybil is the lone character in the story, who seems to understand Seymour and the only one with whom he actually communicates. A later exchange, in the final section of the story that ends with Salinger’s matter-of-fact scripting of Seymour’s sudden suicide, illustrates the man’s total inability to communicate with adults in any logical manner. Isolation and desperation are themes that constantly appear in Salinger’s work: the idea of sheer beauty in the midst of human squalor and the innocence of children contrasted with the weight of adult life.

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Nine Stories

By j.d. salinger, nine stories summary and analysis of "a perfect day for bananafish".

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” the first story in J. D. 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. 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. She finishes lacquering a fingernail before picking the phone up; she is “a girl who for a ringing dropped exactly nothing.”

The woman on the line is her mother. “I’ve been worried to death about you,” the mother says. She starts off by asking why Muriel hasn’t phoned earlier, and then demands to know who drove to the hotel. 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.

More details follow. 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. 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.

As 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. It seems that even then Seymour’s behavior – and particularly his pale countenance – were enough to elicit concern. Still, Muriel seems decidedly unconcerned, and she grows more and more irritated with her mother’s agitation.

The conversation ends with the mother again pleading to her daughter to come home and perhaps reconsider things. “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. “You could take a lovely cruise.” Muriel refuses. “When I think of how you waited for that boy all through the war,” the mother replies. 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). With that the chat comes to a close.

Next, we meet a young girl named Sybil Carpenter . She is staying at the hotel with her mother, and is scurrying across the beach when she happens upon Seymour. He is lying on his back, wrapped in the bathrobe, squinting in the sunlight. She asks him if he is returning to the water, to “see more glass”. The two have spoken before.

After explaining that he was waiting to go in the water with Sybil, Seymour remarks on the girl’s fine bathing suit. “If there’s one thing I like, it’s a blue bathing suit,” he says. “This is a yellow ,” Sybil counters.

The young man and girl talk, and there is an easy rapport between them. 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. 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. “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.

Seymour explains that bananafish have a tendency to swim into holes filled with bananas. While perfectly normal fish before entering the holes, once inside the bananafish become ravenous and devour all the bananas they can spot. The result: they grow too fat to escape from the hole. “They lead a very tragic life,” Seymour says.

Soon Sybil reports: “I just saw one.” Seymour plays along, asks how many bananas the fish had in his mouth.

Shortly thereafter, Sybil and Seymour get out of the water and part ways. Seymour returns to the hotel, and confronts a woman in the elevator for apparently having looked at his feet. “I happened to be looking at the floor,” the woman says. “If you want to look at my feet, say so,” Seymour snaps back. “But don’t be a God-damned sneak about it.”

When he reaches the fifth floor, he gets out and enters Room 507. There Muriel is lying on the bed, asleep. 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.”

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” put J. D. Salinger on the map. It was published in The New Yorker in 1948, and few short stories in the history of American letters have met with such immediate acclaim. To a modern reader, it is easy to miss what to 40’s readers was the story’s principal and disturbing undercurrent: post-traumatic stress disorder. The late 40’s were in large part a period of reaction to World War II, as exhibited in the burgeoning school of film noir, the influx of apocalyptic B-movies, and new waves in philosophy and literary theory.

“Bananafish”, with its unsettling mixture of the mundane and the tragic, the light-hearted and the cataclysmic, captured, in its straightforward, deceptively muted style and sensibility, the push-and-pull condition of returning WWII veterans (of which Salinger was one). The ending comes across as a complete shock, and Salinger refuses to linger on it. The very last phrase of the story is “fired a bullet through his right temple” – leaving readers speechless and denying them authorial intervention to interpret the event. The result is that a reader must backtrack in memory through the story to construct a logical framework that can guide him or her from the comic bounciness of the beginning to the sudden bloodshed at the end. Salinger’s decision to send such disparate tones careening into one another is a way of underlining the essential absurdity of war as it seeps into (and refuses to leave) peacetime life.

Salinger, in his devotion to linear time, in his restriction of the narrator’s voice to just the physical particulars of the scene – so that the short story plays out seemingly “in real time”, like a piece of documented and uninterpreted reality, even like a film – simulates the real-life effect of a suicide. It may come across as a surprise, but as soon as the event has taken place, one invariably sifts through the moments that preceded it in hopes of finding a reason. Indeed, when interpreted in this context, the story is full of indices to Seymour’s death wish: the mother’s mention of his “funny business” with the trees while driving suggests he has tried to crash into a tree before; his complaint about his tattoo and his comment that Sybil’s bathing suit is “blue” may not be bits of jokery but instead reflections of a hallucinatory and seriously deranged mind; the oft commented-upon pallor of his skin points to depression, as does his tendency to stay wrapped up in his bathrobe while on the beach; his talk with Muriel’s grandmother “about her plans for passing away” indicates an undue fascination with death; and so forth and so forth.

What is most telling, however, is the way in which Salinger implicitly posits Seymour as a sort of prophet, wise beyond his years and perhaps ahead of his time. His story of the bananafish could serve as a metaphor for humanity, particularly the postwar boom generation; surrounded by riches, we cannot help but consume and consume, regardless of the consequences. We are each trapped in our own banana-filled hole. Seymour, able to converse with a child (one should recall the traditional notion of the child as in some ways more wise than the adult, per Rousseau, Wordsworth, Miller, and many other writers and thinkers), is also able to see humanity’s plight for what it is, suggesting that through his madness he has at least managed to escape the “hole”. There is always that fine line between “madman” and “genius”, after all, a line which Salinger explores again in “ Teddy ”, the final entry in Nine Stories .

Of course, much of the writing on Seymour as “genius” in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is informed by the character’s larger backstory, as constructed by Salinger throughout his career. Seymour is one of the children of the Glass family – the same family that gave birth to Franny and Zooey , and which appears and reappears throughout Nine Stories – and, as we learn from other stories and books involving him, he is preternaturally gifted, a deep thinker and an inquisitive mind. In a humorous bit of self-reference, the first line spoken to Seymour in “Bananafish” is the following question from Sybil: “Are you going in the water, see more glass?”

Returning to the notion of the bananafish as metaphor for the fatally consumptive American, it is significant that Salinger devotes the entire first half of his story to Muriel’s conversation with her mother – a conversation in which materialism repeatedly rears its head. Muriel at one point refers to “that awful dinner dress”, and later discusses “the clothes of this year” with her mother: “Terrible,” Muriel calls them. “But out of this world. You see sequins – everything.” Seymour, by contrast, can’t even get the color of Sybil’s bathing suit right.

Consider also the paragraph that opens the story, and its insistent emphasis on such aspects of postwar America as advertising, women’s magazines, fashion, and cosmetics:

“There were ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel […] She used the time, though. She read an article in a women’s pocket-size magazine, called ‘Sex is Fun – Or Hell.’ She washed her comb and brush. She took the spot out of the skirt of her beige suit. She moved the button on her Saks blouse. She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs in her mole. When the operator finally rang her room, she was sitting on the window seat and had almost finished putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand.”

Intriguingly, Salinger closes his story with a similar focus on objects – only now the object in question is “an Ortgies caliber 7.65 automatic.” The society of commodities turns back on itself; the bananas kill the fish. Perhaps Seymour escapes, through his wisdom or his madness (or both). Or perhaps he’s just another fish trapped in the hole.

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Study Guide for Nine Stories

Nine Stories study guide contains a biography of J.D. Salinger, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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Nine Stories literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Nine Stories.

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A Perfect Day for Bananafish

J. d. salinger.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on J. D. Salinger's A Perfect Day for Bananafish . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

A Perfect Day for Bananafish: Introduction

A perfect day for bananafish: plot summary, a perfect day for bananafish: detailed summary & analysis, a perfect day for bananafish: themes, a perfect day for bananafish: quotes, a perfect day for bananafish: characters, a perfect day for bananafish: symbols, a perfect day for bananafish: literary devices, a perfect day for bananafish: theme wheel, brief biography of j. d. salinger.

Historical Context of A Perfect Day for Bananafish

Other books related to a perfect day for bananafish.

• Full Title: A Perfect Day for Bananafish
• When Written: Late 1940s
• Where Written: New York
• When Published: 1948 in The New Yorker ; 1953 in Nine Stories
• Literary Period: Modernism
• Genre: Short Story
• Setting: A resort on the coast of Florida in 1948
• Climax: Seymour shoots himself in the temple.
• Antagonist: Emotional trauma from war; American consumerism; isolation
• Point of View: Third Person

Extra Credit for A Perfect Day for Bananafish

Family Affair. Many of Salinger’s stories feature other members of the Glass family, but “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is the only one in which Seymour Glass, the eldest child in the family, appears in real time. In other stories, he’s referred to in passing or appears in other characters’ memories.

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A Perfect Day for Bananafish

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Analysis: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” explores Seymour’s search for meaning following his return from World War II. Seymour struggles to come to terms with his experiences in the war and is unable to find a place for himself in the world. He is surrounded by people who are concerned with superficial things, such as social status and appearance, and he is unable to connect with them on a meaningful level. Four-year-old Sybil represents innocence and purity, something that Seymour is desperate to hold on to but ultimately cannot.

The narrative structure is straightforward, consisting of two brief scenes and three extended ones. Only the fifth scene is without dialogue, placing its focus squarely on Seymour’s actions as he returns to room 507, finds Muriel asleep, and then takes his life. Told in a third-person omniscient point of view , the story uses both direct character names and generalized character references. For example, Seymour is “the young man,” and Muriel is “the girl” while chatting with her mother and “the lady” to Sybil. This style choice provides distance between the reader and the characters, which mirrors Seymour’s detachment from the rest of the world. Only innocent Sybil is consistently referred to by name.

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In thematic development of The Psychological Effects of War , the story highlights the long-term effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the experiences of a war veteran trying to cope with trauma. J. D. Salinger was a World War II veteran himself, and his commentary underscores the treatment of returning soldiers during the postwar era. Seymour’s erratic behavior results from his traumatic wartime experiences, and his terrycloth bathrobe symbolizes his attempt to conceal his mental, emotional, and physical vulnerability:

‘He won’t take his bathrobe off? Why not?’ […]

‘He says he doesn’t want a lot of fools looking at his tattoo.’

‘He doesn’t have any tattoo! Did he get one in the Army?’

‘No, Mother. No, dear’ (7).

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Character development is central to the story’s thematic impact. Seymour’s inability to communicate effectively with his wife and the other hotel guests shows that he is experiencing symptoms of PTSD, such as social isolation and emotional numbing. When he confronts the woman in the elevator for looking at his feet, he continues to talk about it after he’s driven her off: “I have two normal feet and I can’t see the slightest God-damned reason why anybody should stare at them” (13). Salinger juxtaposes how other characters perceive Seymour to foreshadow Seymour’s eventual death by suicide. Prior to the elevator scene, the narrative provides two contrasting depictions of Seymour: as the “maniac” Muriel’s mother fears, and as the gentle playmate of a small girl. Seymour is a round and dynamic character, and Sybil and Muriel serve as contrasting static characters who highlight Seymour’s mental turmoil and internal conflict.

Seymour’s unusual relationship with Sybil develops the themes of The Search for Meaning and Connection and The Tension Between Experience and Innocence . Their interactions provide a glimpse into Seymour’s desire for an authentic connection with someone who is unburdened by the trauma of war. Sybil’s innocence and naivety provide Seymour with a sense of comfort and safety that he is unable to find elsewhere. He is comfortable enough with her to remove his robe and go swimming with her. Sybil’s characterization of Seymour as a reflective surface (“see more glass”) underscores her innocence. She is overtly unaware of Seymour’s bizarre behaviors and conversational responses, allowing Seymour a reprieve from societal judgment. However, their interaction is short-lived, thanks partly to Seymour’s own actions. The story leaves the significance and appropriateness of Seymour’s kiss to Sybil’s foot ambiguous. However, the fact that Sybil leaves Seymour “without regret,” coupled with her startled response to the gesture, suggests that she at least perceives it as a violation of some sort. The reasons for Seymour’s suicide are similarly opaque, but the episode opens up the possibility that it is a reaction not merely to his alienation (now exacerbated by the possible loss of Sybil’s companionship) but rather to a sense that he is tainted by his wartime experiences.

Seymour’s explanation of bananafish unites these two ideas, serving as a metaphor both for his own struggle with mental illness and as a commentary on the society with which he no longer belongs. The bananafish are driven to eat so much that they become trapped in their own greed and die. Seymour sees himself as a bananafish, unable to get out of the hole that is his mind and driven to the brink of destruction. However, the bananafish’s insatiable hunger also embodies the corrupt values of postwar American society. Seymour’s imaginary bananafish foreshadow his suicide, which the narrative frames as Seymour’s attempt to escape the limitations and meaninglessness of his existence. Salinger suggests that even the most meaningful connections and experiences are ultimately futile in the face of the larger forces of the universe.

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