A Perfect Day For Bananafish Literary Analysis

J.D. Salinger’s short story A Perfect Day for Bananafish, is a war story in disguised , as it contains a sufficient amount of war imagery and references. The story, is about Seymour Glass, a WWII veteran, about how he loses his innocence after experiencing combat and how it affects him when he returns home. Its about how ordinary people go to war, and see things that changes them forever. To quote a WWII General, “There are no such things as extraordinary men who change events, there are only extraordinary events that change ordinary men.” In the short story it is implied that Seymour fought in WWII. And in the story there’s a particular number that keeps being brought up, 507. This number is very significant in WWII. 507 (May 07 1945),

After Seymour went swimming, he went to his hotel room, got out a pistol and shot himself. The pistol he shot himself with was no ordinary pistol, it specifically was an Ortgies 7.65 caliber. But why an Ortgies, why not any ordinary pistol, why not a service revolver, why not a Colt. Why use a german pistol, when he, himself was an american soldier and probably had a gun of his own. Why. Could it symbolize something. Ortgies is german gun, so naturally Seymour must have taken it from a german solider during the war. This completes the picture, Seymour took the gun off a german soldier. He probably took it after the skirmish, where he and his soldiers. It goes to show that, Seymour might have physically won in the fighting, but he didn't win mentally. At the end, the gun of the soldier he fought against in battle, because the instrument he used to kill himself, quite ironic. To sum it up, J.D Salinger’s A Perfect Day for Bananafish, is a secretly a story about war. Salinger had experienced war first hand, and when he returned home he wrote about it, thought these innocent little stories. He wrote about how war destroys people, how it changes