Bananafish Symbol Analysis

The titular bananafish—a kind of fish that Seymour makes up to entertain Sybil—has two layers of symbolic significance: the story that Seymour tells about the fish is a metaphor for the destruction caused by war and by hyper-materialistic culture. As the story goes, bananafish are much like regular fish, only they swim into holes that are full of bananas. Once inside those holes, the bananafish feast on bananas until they’re so fat that they can’t swim back out of the hole, at which point they die of “banana fever.” Given that Seymour has recently returned from fighting in World War II and is clearly still haunted by all he witnessed there, it’s reasonable that those experiences would bleed into the story he makes up for Sybil. Indeed, it seems that the bananafish symbolize soldiers who went into the war as regular, run-of-the-mill men (like the bananafish prior to swimming into the banana hole) but then witnessed and committed so many violent acts (feasted on so many bananas) that they eventually died—whether mentally, emotionally, spiritually, or physically (succumbing to banana fever).

However, it’s also possible to consider the bananafish and their insatiable appetites in the context of the resort-goers’ similarly insatiable materialism. Just like the holes are filled with bananas, the resort is overflowing with wealth—designer clothing, calf-skin luggage, silks, and more. In Seymour’s story, just one taste of a banana triggers the bananafish to gluttonously overindulge (“Why, I’ve known some bananafish to […] eat as many as seventy-eight bananas,” Seymour tells Sybil gravely), which suggests that a single taste of luxury incites a similar kind of single-minded obsession and overindulgence. Like the bananafish with their swollen stomachs, unable to squeeze back out through the hole, those who become beholden to wealth and greed can never escape that life. In Seymour’s story, the bananafish, overstuffed with bananas, die of so-called banana fever. He doesn’t explain what this is, but his use of the word fever here seems to suggest that the greed and gluttony that consumerism can kick up in a person are a type of mental fever—that is, materialism thrusts people into a fanatic and frenzied mental state. While the bananafish literally die of their fever, those who are ensnared in materialism’s grasp “die” psychologically and are unable to lead normal, healthy lives again.