This story’s summary was as follows: Muriel at the hotel and her mother talked thorough the phones and her mother warned her you should take care of him-Seymour who lived with her may lost completely control and need to went to the psychiatrist. That Seymour went to the beach with a girl-Sybil Carpenter who was staying at the hotel with her mother and planned to come on an airplane tomorrow, and spoke to her “Have you ever seen Bananafish”, she said no…But when they went in the sea and when the float was level she said “I saw bananafish”. They left and Seymour went hotel room where Muriel was lying and kill himself by a gun.
It’s difficult to interpret what Bananafish implied but in the meaning of a person who need to went to the psychiatrist and Bananafish’s habits was peculiar, I thought it’s a kind of Kappa in “Kappa” by Akutagawa. I picked up the habits of Bananafish: Bananafish eat a banana in the hole as many as seventy-eight, and they’re so fat and can’t get out of the hole again-in other words they die. .
A girl-Sybil said watched a Bananafish have six bananas when the float was level, it’s the same amounts the scene she said there were the tigers round around the trees in the book of “Little Black Sambo”, so I guess that bananas means the tigers for Sybil, and Bananafish was so strong for her.
I got interested in the scene after Seymour come back hotel and rode on the elevator and he said a woman in the elevator “You’re looking at my feet”, she said no.-I wonder why Salinger took attention to the feet. This- using the word around feet in the story was the habitual saying for Salinger probably, I collected as follows- when the scene talking Muriel and her mother Muriel putting her weight on her right leg and the scene just before Sybil watched Bananafish, Seymour took Sybil’s ankles in his hands and pressed down and forward.
Bibliography
Jerome David Salinger, (1968), “Nine stories”, New York: Bantam Books
(J. D. サリンジャー・繁尾久-武田勝彦-滝沢寿三訳、『九つの物語/大工たちよ、屋根の梁を高く上げよ』、荒地出版社、1997年)
