Sanity and Social Norms Theme Analysis

Throughout “A Perfect Day For Bananafish,” young World War II veteran Seymour Glass is implied to be insane. While he and his wife, Muriel, are on vacation at a Florida resort, his behavior is erratic and possibly dangerous: Seymour is paranoid that others are looking at him, he behaves inappropriately with a young girl on the beach, and he ultimately shoots himself in the head in his hotel room. While this seems to affirm Seymour’s insanity, Salinger leaves open the possibility that the man’s suicide is a rational response to his circumstances; perhaps, after the horrors he saw during wartime, it’s simply too jarring for Seymour to exist amid the vapidity and selfishness of upper-class postwar life. By leaving the motivation for Seymour’s suicide ambiguous, Salinger raises the possibility that Seymour’s insanity is a rational rejection of American cultural norms.

Throughout the story, Salinger cultivates the perception that Seymour is insane. This is first apparent in the story’s opening phone conversation between Muriel and her mother, who is wild with panic about whether Muriel is okay. She seems to believe that Seymour is so dangerous that Muriel took a catastrophic risk simply by driving to Florida with him. To account for her exaggerated fear, Muriel’s mother references ominous incidents: “what [Seymour] tried to do with Granny’s chair,” for instance, and “that funny business with the trees.” The clear implication is that Seymour’s past behavior has been erratic and physically destructive. It’s not only Muriel’s mother who thinks Seymour might be dangerous; there are doctors with similar concerns. Muriel says that a psychiatrist at the resort saw Seymour playing piano and asked her if Seymour had been “sick or something,” implying that Seymour’s public behavior is alarming enough to require intervention. Likewise, Muriel’s mother spoke with a different doctor who called it a “crime” that Seymour was released from an army psychiatric hospital. He told her there was a “great chance […] that Seymour may completely lose control of himself,” implying that Seymour is a danger to himself and others.

Seymour’s own behavior seems to affirm that he might be dangerous. This is clearest when he plays on the beach with Sybil, a stranger’s young daughter. While Sybil enjoys their playful and imaginative rapport—discussing her home in “Whirly Wood, Connecticut,” and hunting for imaginary bananafish in the waves—the whole interaction has a sinister undertone. Seymour excessively touches Sybil’s ankles, and when she criticizes him for playing with a different little girl at the resort, he remarks (cryptically quoting T.S. Eliot) about “mixing memory and desire” and tells Sybil that he “pretended she was you.” Affirming the sense that he is being inappropriately sexual, he kisses the arch of Sybil’s foot while they’re in the water, which seems to alarm both of them, making him take her back to shore. Adding a final sense of danger to this interaction, Seymour’s playful and happy mood shifts dramatically as soon as he leaves Sybil. On the elevator ride back to his hotel room, he accuses a woman of staring at his feet in such a frighteningly aggressive way that she flees at the first opportunity. It seems that every adult Seymour meets finds him menacing, which is powerful evidence that he might be insane.

Despite this, Salinger indicates that at least some of Seymour’s erratic behavior is a rational response to his circumstances. For example, when Muriel’s mother suggests that Seymour was crazy to talk “to Granny about her plans for passing away,” she’s describing behavior that (while perhaps insensitive) is not insane. After all, Seymour recently returned from war, so confronting the reality of death likely seems normal to him. Furthermore, Muriel and her mother seem disturbed that Seymour isn’t enjoying vacation, but this, too, seems rational. A luxury resort probably feels profane to Seymour after experiencing the horrors of World War II. In this light, Seymour’s “insanity” seems more like evidence of the dissonance between his traumatic experiences and the vapidity of his current social life.

In further defense of Seymour, Salinger suggests that the norms Seymour is rejecting truly are contemptible. With the exception of Sybil, everyone around Seymour is materialistic, status-obsessed, and conspicuously lacking in empathy. When Muriel and her mother talk on the phone, for instance, they shift between a fussy and judgmental discussion of Seymour’s behavior and a petty conversation about social life at the resort. At no point does either of them express any empathy or understanding of Seymour’s point of view, even though he is clearly suffering. Furthermore, Muriel reveals while talking to her mother that she didn’t even read the book of poetry Seymour mailed her from war, despite its importance to him. Muriel is clearly too caught up in her own wealth and status to try to understand her husband’s feelings and experiences, which suggests that she—and the culture that shaped her—bear significant blame for Seymour’s difficulty with re-adjusting to civilian life. In this light, Seymour’s inability to assimilate himself to the callous materialism of the world around him seems less like a symptom of insanity than a rational and inevitable response to experiencing a devastating war.

Ultimately, when Seymour returns to his hotel room from the beach, he sees his wife sleeping and smells her nail polish and new calf-skin luggage (emblems of the cruel and shallow culture he hates). He then kills himself with a pistol. It’s not clear whether this is simply an act of insanity, or whether his suicide is a rational choice to reject the callous materialism around him—it’s probably a bit of both. But by leaving ambiguous which of Seymour’s behaviors are dangerously insane and which might be moral rejections of social norms, Salinger suggests that Seymour alone is not responsible for his fate: the horrors of both war and civilian life have driven him there.