Day For Bananafish

Bananafish represent many things in J.D. Salinger’s story “A Perfect Day For Bananafish”. Bananafish are fictional animals whom live in the ocean. They go into holes full of bananas, and eat until they are full, but cannot get back out of the hole again and eventually die. Seymour, the character who came up with the idea of bananafish, went to war, and suffers from PTSD or depression because he commits suicide at the end of the story. Seymour communicates better with children than adults; for example, when Seymour is at the beach and Sybil, a little girl, comes up to him. “Sybil offers him a glimpse of the world as he would like it to be – innocent, curious, and pure”, (Shmoop Editorial Team). She says to him, “Are you going in the water?”, and Seymour replies, “I was waiting for you” (Salinger 9). Obviously he wasn't waiting for Sybil to come, but tells her what she wants to hear. …show more content…
Salinger represents childhood as an innocent time, and people in the child-like world are not able to see the evils of the world, which makes childhood a good thing. Salinger represents the adult world as a place where communication is hard, where characters are able to see the evils of the world, and where the people are very materialistic, which makes it a bad and scary place to be. Before bananafish go into the banana hole, they are considered innocent, because they haven't eaten the bananas. Eating the bananas represents the action of losing the child-like innocence. After the bananafish have eaten the bananas, or lost their innocence, they cannot get back out of the banana hole again, or go back into the child-like innocence they once contained. This life cycle of the bananafish represents how the change from childhood to adulthood is an irreversible