hiroko utsumi a perfect day for bananafish

#Hiroko utsumi a perfect day for bananafish full

While Seymour has a poetic sensibility (he references T.S. Muriel, for instance, seemingly only cares about wealth.

Just as Seymour’s bananafish story predicts, other characters in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” seem spiritually corrupted by their materialism. It's not that they overeat and their stomachs explode, or that they exhaust their supply of bananas and starve-the bananas make them psychologically addled, and that is what kills them. So Seymour seems to be saying that banana fever is akin to the psychological fever of materialism, which is what kills wealthy people.

The bananafish die of 'banana fever.' Seymour doesn't clarify what that is, but a fever is often a reference to a psychological state-just as a fever addles the brain, when someone talks about 'fevered' behavior, they usually mean fanatic and delusional. This makes them unable to leave the world of wealth and exist in normal society, which kills them. This implies that once someone tastes luxury, they transform into beings propelled by greed. When the fish enter the holes, they become totally beholden to their gluttony they eat so many bananas that they can no longer physically leave the hole, and they eventually die.

#Hiroko utsumi a perfect day for bananafish full

The resort is like the holes full of bananas-just as the holes separate the fish from the rest of the ocean, the resort is cloistered from the outside world, and it's full of bananas in the sense that it's brimming with luxury and wealth. According to Seymour, the bananafish seem at first like normal fish, but then they swim into holes that are full of bananas. The story that Seymour makes up for Sybil about the bananafish speaks to the idea that consumerism can have a corrupting effect on person, drawing a clear parallel between the resort guests’ greed and the bananafish’s insatiable appetites. In exploring the resort-goers’ materialism and how this pushes Seymour towards suicide, Salinger stresses that greed can destroy people on both a spiritual and physical level. But for Seymour, who has recently returned from fighting in World War II, the resort is a hellish place, brimming with shallow people who are obsessed with accruing, discussing, and showing off their wealth-people much like his own materialistic wife, Muriel. Everyone is surrounded by decadent things like calfskin leather, designer clothes, silks, and fashion magazines, suggesting that the resort and its patrons are the very embodiment of upper-class refinement. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is set at a dazzling resort along the Florida coast where upper-class guests luxuriate and indulge.