- #A perfect day for bananafish questions and answers how to
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He’s on vacation with his wife in Florida.
Character List:Ī young, newlywed soldier who has just returned from the war. Later published as part of the collection Nine Stories. GradeSaver, 30 October 2008 Web.The New Yorker January 31, 1948.
#A perfect day for bananafish questions and answers how to
Next Section Test Yourself! - Quiz 1 Previous Section Related Links Buy Study Guide How To Cite in MLA Format Chazelle, Damien. One could argue Salinger decries the materialism of 50’s America one could argue he sees his society as comprised of fundamentally good people, people who might stumble but who invariably mean well one could argue he uses his society as fodder for satire a la Mark Twain one could argue he sees America as a nation crawling out of the wreckage of World War II without even realizing it is doing so (unlike Europe, where that wreckage was not just emotional and psychological but physical). What does Salinger seem to be saying about American society in Nine Stories?Ī: There are many potential answers to this question. It is also worth comparing this passage, in its clarity, to the end of “Teddy.”ĭiscuss the role of children in Nine Stories – children as character, children as metaphor.Ī: Children appear in almost all of the entries in Nine Stories and they often represent a fuzzy-bordered coexistence of ironically limited awareness and extraordinary perceptiveness.
This is to say, he leaves his readers with a sentence of shocking violence, refusing to linger on the moment or comment on it (a move that would arguably dull its impact).
#A perfect day for bananafish questions and answers full
Their age stands in the way of a full understanding of their world – and yet, youth also allows them to see things more clearly in many ways than their older counterparts.Īnalyze the closing paragraph of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Consider tone, syntax, diction, rhythm.Ī: The key thing to consider in this essay is that Salinger ends his story, quite literally, with a bang. He seems to be alluding to his own impending death, but the poem is also a commentary on the fragility of human life in general – a concept particularly important to Salinger, especially given his frequent allusions to World War II in Nine Stories.Ĭompare the narrator of “The Laughing Man” to Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye.Ī: Both Holden and the narrator of “The Laughing Man” follow the Huckleberry Finn model of limited awareness. “Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die.” Discuss.Ī: The quote is a Japanese poem recited by Teddy. That we jump to that conclusion, however, means we have implicitly accepted Teddy as a genius-savant-seer, one who can correctly see his own demise before it occurs.ĭiscuss the depiction of love in Nine Stories.Ī: While Nine Stories is full of examples of romantic love, the kind of love that seems to most interest Salinger is of a different variety: the love between Esme and X the love between Lionel and his mother the love between the nineteen year-old art instructor and his star pupil, Sister Irna. We cannot be certain that Teddy dies, or that his sister pushes him into the pool. They can be described as vignettes or single scenes, told by an omniscient narrator with limited awareness, recounted in more or less real-time, with occasional ellipses.Ī: This question is not as simple as it might at first seem, because Salinger deliberately withholds key details from the reader. Pick one of the following stories in Nine Stories and analyze it: “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” “Down at the Dinghy,” “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes.”Ī: These are the shortest of the stories in Nine Stories. Memory plays a big role in both works as well. War also creeps into conversation, turns up in passing asides even the prose itself seems to present a vision of a society both in mourning (for the dead) and jubilation (for victory). Dalloway and Seymour Glass in Nine Stories are both shell-shocked war vets, set adrift in peacetime society and unable to cope with their surroundings. Dalloway.Ī: In both works, the war in question has recently ended and is still exerting an effect on everyday, civilian society. Discuss the use of death as motif and metaphor in Nine Stories.Ī: The key stories to look at here are obviously “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “Teddy,” but death figures prominently, albeit indirectly, in other tales: “Uncle Wiggily,” “The Laughing Man,” “For Esme – with Love and Squalor,” and “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period.”Ĭompare and contrast the references to and use of World War II in Nine Stories to Virginia Woolf’s allusions to World War I in Mrs.
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