A Perfect Day For Bananafish Essay

JJ Moussa
Ms. Brockway
English 12
23 December 2022

Every human has their own struggles. Different events in one’s life can alter the way one perceives the world. This is evident in J.D. Salinger’s short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, which follows Seymour Glass and his struggle to regain feelings that he once had. Through symbolism in J.D. Salinger's short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," the reader is shown how important innocence is and how people who have lost it would stop at nothing to regain it.
Seymour tries to regain his sense of innocence, and the author highlights this through the symbolic use of color and feet. Throughout the story, the reader discovers that Seymour Glass has endured much during his life. He served

He has lost all feelings of innocence as a result of this. Although Seymour's mental state would improve by communicating, he and his wife Murial do not share the same perspective. Murial is in denial about the issue and neither knows nor cares about what is happening in his world. In the meantime, Seymour is coping with the effects of being in a war and surrounded by death every day. This leads to increasing amounts of isolation between them and is especially shown while they are on vacation. To deal with this intense feeling of loneliness, Seymour starts interacting with Sybil, a child that wanders away from her mother and ends up near Seymour while he is alone. Although this interaction between an adult and a child appears predatory, the reader could perceive it in a different light; Seymour is making an effort to feel innocent again. One of the ways he does this is by commenting on Sybil’s bathing suit. While talking to Sybil about a different subject, he interrupts himself to say "That's a fine bathing suit you have on. If there's one thing I like, it's a blue bathing suit" (Salinger 8). While Sybil is defending the fact that she is wearing yellow, they both decide they want to go in the water and try to catch a bananafish.

Now that Seymour has said that they are both wearing blue bathing suits, the reader can understand how he is attempting to connect himself with Sybil's innocence. He implied that because Sybil is wearing a blue bathing suit, which is a color associated with innocence, then he must also be innocent as well. Along with color, the symbolic use of a child’s feet is utilized to describe one’s want of innocence. When the reader is introduced to Sybil, Salinger included the fact that she was “stopping only to sink a foot in a soggy, collapsed castle…” (Salinger 7). Sybil is continually stomping on someone's work, further damaging it, even though the castles were wet and had already disintegrated a bit. This indicates that in Seymour's opinion, Sybil's feet would not be as innocent as he believed they would be if he knew about this. In addition, Seymour overstepped his boundaries when it came to Sybil in his pursuit of innocence. "The young man suddenly picked up one of Sybil's wet feet, which were drooping over the end of the float, and kissed the arch" (Salinger 12). This might not have happened if he