A Story I Loved: "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by JD Salinger
- Staff Writer
- Aug 31
- 4 min read
Probably the oldest story we've covered on the website so far, and so I approach it a little differently. I read this story a little less intuitively than some of the fresh New Yorker stories I’ve gone through previously. It can’t be helped, not really. The language is a little more dated, but there’s something enchanting about it. The older short stories, I think, are almost more mythical to me, if only because of their age, because of the fact they were written at different time periods, under the hold of different literary influences. Art is not insular. We are all influenced by what we grew up around. I grew up around Salinger, too, but I still feel a little uncomfortable to be in a room alone with him. I find myself re-reading him twice, painstakingly, thinking I’ve been interpreting each sentence wrong.
The drone of the wife’s various handicaps, the tired, bored ennui of a housewife's life. She's just a plot device, her various meaningless tirades meant to signal how air-conditioned this life is, how tragically circular. It's vacuous, and meant to be so. But it's not too much of a caricature.
I see the Hemingway influence, too. The two men met, having lived during the Second World War, but I don't really care too much about their personal relationship as much as it interests me that they lived during the same time, experienced much of the same struggles. They both wrote about war, the same war, but "A Farewell from Arms" feels almost alien to "Catcher in the Rye". Like from different emotional planets- the world that exists between utter Stoicism and the emotional way that Salinger's men revert by letting themselves break and bend. Two different versions of masculinity, two different ways of navigating a new world that has no right answers. In the total hollowness of a life that has seen just how cheap and hollow life truly becomes on the battlefield, people tend to come away with different mythologies, different ideals. It's fascinating.
Salinger's talents for dialogue are at full play in this story, I think, and it's what gives the ability of the story to feel true. He has the talent of being a good writer, which is almost entirely separate from normal intelligence and kind of irrelevant to much else in the world besides writing. He had a story to tell, and he tells it here. I mean, the language is all here. Everything adds up to a complete story. He does it really well- the language of tricking, the language of being tricked. Of cold rationalization, between the mother and the daughter, about her husband’s mental state, and the husband's own digressions down at the beach with the little girl.
Read the story again- it's short and well worth your time, and it's one of those stories that's rather difficult to discuss from any merit point besides the actual specifics of the language. I like how the main character is at once both fatherly and fatherless, child-like and yet trying to portray the stance of somebody all-knowing. Of trying, like the Dungeon Master we discussed earlier, to give this little kid a lesson. He makes up banana-fish, almost allegorically. And yet something about the interaction between him and the little girl fails to give him what he desires from it. He is friendly to her, but she is confused by him, justifiably so. When he kisses her feet, he thinks he’s being saintly, almost knightly to her. It's something akin, this whole little scene, of Mary wiping Jesus's feet clean with her hair. But he’s only being a creep. He’s scaring her, and she runs off quickly, trying to rid herself of this strange man.
I think, also, this child-like nature of his behavior reinforces his loneliness, and shows how alienated he feels from adults, though he is indisputably one. Everything about him projects it to the world- his age, his appearance, his experiences. Salinger is one of those writers who wrote about a very small band of emotional experiences, a very specific time. He wrote about it well, and precisely. But reading this story reminds me unmistakably of Catcher in the Rye, of a Girl I Knew, of Small Rebellion Off Madison Square. I can't really separate them. They all exist in this fuzzy emotional canon and I see why they all had to exist, in their own ways, for various reasons. He was obviously germinating this character in his head for a long time, and this is sort of the more adult culmination of a Holden Caulfield, terrorized by a war, by everyday life, by a wife he maybe loves or maybe doesn't, but of course that's never been the point. He can't be rescued. He has an almost Grecian tragedy to him as he walks back to the elevator, but it's comic and absurd at the same time. He accuses the woman in the elevator of being a creep and looking at his feet, being positively rude in contrast to how sweet he was with the bratty girl, how fatherly. What is he looking for: love, affection, meaning, purpose? We don't find out because he never finds out. He blows his brains out.
I think what Salinger gets so right is the nuances of everyday life, of real people. Even if the people don’t quite talk like this anymore, the base foundations are the same. His characters are so human. There’s a reason why Holden Caulfield rings so true to teenagers, to this day, even if the slang isn’t quite right, even if other things have progressed. That alienation from the self, displayed by dialogue or small behavioral tics, is what Salinger is really great at. I think that's also why I don't mind writers knowing what they know, intimately. Salinger felt some of this same alienation, returning, post-war, to a country obsessed with money and status, going into the heyday boom of the Mad Men era- advertisements and glitz, money, leaving behind a jaded, lost generation of men just like him. Salinger is thoroughly unremarkable in his ailments. Without purpose or aim. What do humans do in spite of this? They write, obviously.
Resources
Read "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" here:
