Greed In J. D. Salinger's A Perfect Day For Bananafish

J.D.Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is able to portray Seymour Glass’ and the hardship he has to face after experiencin a war veteran from the second world war Seymour Glass seems as if he has post traumatic stress disorders as he acts abnormally, which can be inferred from the phone call between his wife Muriel and her mother discussing about Seymour’s idiosyncratic behavior. Like a war is caused by the materialistic greed of humans, the imaginary creature thought up through Seymour’s naive and innocent imagination represents the idea of materialistic greed. In a passage from “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” the author implies the idea of materialistic greed of humans through the innocent and youthful imagination of the bananafish and its greed for bananas. Initially, Seymour alludes to how humans’ materialistic greed causes tragic ends throughs the bananafish. He mentions that the bananafish die after talking about how they grow over time. To begin with, after Seymour first discusses about the bananafish, he talks about how “they swim into a hole where there’s a lot of bananas… [then] they behave like pigs.” The bananafish Seymour talk about in this context refers to us humans, how we enter society(bananafish hole), full of available ‘material’. Then, they behave like pigs, blinded by materialistic greed, having clear and rational decisions. This can also be shown through the setting of the story; after World War 2, when there was an economic boom and the United …show more content…
Bananafish begin life and enter just like any other human, but are blinded by the materialistic greed, and unable to look for their future, they are unable to recover from having a materialistic, greedy mind which can lead to a tragic end;