Irony, Imagery, Style in A Perfect Day for Bananafish - Essay Example

The plot interestingly starts with Muriel, Seymour’s wife, sitting in the hotel and talking to her mother over the phone who is insisting Muriel spend the vacation with them. Muriel is irritated and seems to be in a conflict with Seymour. “I’m not going to pack everything and come home”, is what she tells her mother which further proves her conflicting personality (Salinger). The plot then turns to Seymour who is out at the beach when a young girl, Sybil, comes over to him and he takes her into the water to catch some bananafish. They seem easy with each other. It proves that Seymour and Muriel are struggling to find a way out of their tense routines. Seymour gets into an elevator and gets bugged by a woman, proving that he gets irritated unreasonably. Then he enters his room and shoots himself, finally proving his depression or anxiety disorder.

The theme in the story revolves around the matrimonial relationship of Seymour and Muriel and Seymour’s deranged mind, as we understand. Muriel no longer seems to be interested in Seymour and his illness although she had been in love with him. “When I think of how you waited for that boy all through the war”, her mother says to her over the phone. But now, she is getting irritated over his mental state. Also, Seymour has become depressingly ill-minded after coming back from the war which shows how weird wars deal with people and their minds. Why he shoots himself at the end makes the reader connect different points in the story to the tragic bloodshed at the end. His talk about Muriel’s grandmother “about her plans for passing away” shows he is fascinated with the concept of death. His parents-in-law calling his driving a “funny business” shows that he has been trying to smash in the trees before. His agitated mind and an unconcerned wife finally led him to death as he “fired a bullet through his right temple.”

The metaphor that we find is the bananafish and its description given by Seymour himself. The bananafish enters the holes where it spots bananas, and eats lots of them to become too fat to escape. And there, they die. This bananafish story is actually a metaphor relating to the postwar humanity encircled by treasures and resources which we devour and devour without giving a thought to the consequences. Greed leads us to destruction and we do not understand it. All of us are ensnared in our banana-filled holes. We get trapped knowingly.

The metaphor of bananafish makes us criticize our own selves and loath our sense of greed.