J.D. Salinger’s, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, is a story that does not give the reader all the facts about its characters but rather provides dialogue and actions to interpret the types of people they are and what is wrong with Seymour Glass. The conversations between the characters gives the reader the most insight on Seymour’s condition and the issue that Salinger is trying to address. These dialogues are not straight to the point or exactly clear, including the telephone conversation between Muriel and her mother which has a lot of interrupting and abrupt changes in the subject of the call, therefore the reader must analyze the dialogue and try to understand why the subject of Seymour’s odd behavior repeatedly occurs. Seymour’s condition is the main subject of this story because it is repeatedly addressed in Muriel’s conversation and on the beach where the reader observes his strange behaviors and what he says. The most notable thing that Seymour talks about is the bananafish is an eccentric idea. Most of this story is told through human interactions that are intended to be analyzed through personal experience and the readers perception of a situation. The analysis of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” will tell us that Salinger was using this story to describe how coming home from a war with PTSD to a place where no one understands this disease can change a person’s personality and ultimately ruin their lives which led a lot of veterans to do violent actions, even suicide.

The choice of calling the gluttonous sea creature that Seymour made up a bananafish was the most curious part of this story. The title, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, paints a different type of story in the readers head than what actually happens. This is odd because bananafish is a word that makes the reader think of the color yellow which usually relates to the emotion happy but this fish is not necessarily any of those things. When Seymour describes the bananafish it is a representation of one of the seven deadly sins, which is gluttony. The fish that consumes too many bananas that it can’t get out of the hole, therefore it dies. Seymour’s description of how it dies in a hole is a metaphor for what he has experienced. Since he is suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) he is having trouble coping with all the violence and things that he had to endear overseas. In this metaphor the bananas that the bananafish consumes too much of are the terrors and violence that Seymour Glass endured during World War II, while the hole represents Seymours act of actually going overseas to Europe where he experienced all these horrors, and the bananafish itself is Seymour Glass because he feels that he's absorbed too much of the hate and heartbreak that comes with war. Ultimately this connection is made at the very end of the story when Seymour kills himself at the hotel room from his thoughts being consumed by suffering and the bananafish kills itself by eating too many bananas. The creature is called a bananafish because it gives an illusion of being a happy and goofy thing with that name and Seymour believes he is outwardly expressing that he is okay and will be happy to those that he knows.  

Most of the story is told through dialogue which shows how the characters interact with each other. The conversations that Salinger writes demonstrate communication that is short and vague on the topics discussed. Besides the constant interrupting each other during Muriel’s telephone call with her mother they both lack the ability to talk about a serious subject, like Seymour’s health, for longer than a few seconds before they change the subject to something more pleasant. This avoidance of talking about Seymour’s condition shows how people in that time period didn't understand what was happening to soldiers mentally after they have endured war. Muriel’s mother also seems very concerned for her daughter’s safety rather than Seymour’s health because she is most likely ignorant to how this disease affects people and just thinks that Seymour is a weird guy. However, both Muriel and her mother know that he needs psychiatric help by the way Muriel talks about the psychiatrist at the hotel and she was planning to learn more about it but in the end they are too late to get him that help because they did not realize how urgent his situation was. The most unclear and perplexing dialogue in the whole story is Seymour’s interaction with the woman in the elevator. Seymour is livid and yells at this woman for staring at his feet but the reader is never told or even hinted at why he would feel this way about someone who might be looking at his feet. This is where Salinger leaves it up to the reader to decide what this encounter meant and if there was actually something physically wrong with him or he was just paranoid from his PTSD. 

A symbol in this story that resembles innocence and seems to be Seymour’s only friend is Sybil whom he goes into the ocean with. She is very young which means she most likely cannot point out Seymour’s odd mannerisms nor does Seymour feel the need to be stressed out about rather she can tell that he’s not the same as he was before the war because she didn’t know him before that time. Sybil’s dialogue shows that she pronounces his name as, “see more glass”, which is odd but may resemble how he sees ordinary life differently now and maybe he sees more hatred in the world than the average American during that time. It is peculiar that Seymour’s friends at this resort are not adults because typically that is what you would assume but he is described as knowing the younger children who are there and he and Sybil speak to each other like they are good friends. You can infer that Seymour does not like violence when he speaks to Sybil about how nice the other little girl, Sharon Lipschutz, is because she doesn’t poke the tiny dogs in the lobby. However, Sybil doesn’t appear to be as kind because she asks Seymour to push Sharon off the piano bench. This could’ve thrown Seymour off and made him realize that there isn’t any pure innocence in the world. In the end he must think that no matter what people will never stop fighting for what is best for them or their interests and result to violence in order to do so. This kind of thinking directly correlates with the things he has seen overseas and on the battle field. He must’ve realized that all the death was not worth the outcome, even if it was winning the war. Sybil was the last genuine conversation that Seymour had with someone before he left to go back to the room and kill himself which can indicate that something during that conversation triggered something inside of him that made it seem as if suffering through life wasn’t worth it anymore. Sybil was a symbol of innocence but she turns into a symbol to Seymour that no matter what the world will always be a place with hatred and violence and he believes he has already consumed enough of that for a lifetime.

Salinger’s writing is a lot like the “iceberg theory” because it takes a lot of analysis of the character’s actions and conversations to really understand the main idea of the story which is almost “hidden”. This story is a tragedy because it demonstrates a horrible disease, PTSD, and exhibits the ignorance of people’s knowledge of it and how their poor communication of the issue leads to a seemingly unexpected death. There are many symbols in this story, especially the bananafish that represents Seymour’s mental situation and how he talks about it to a small child which resembles the future. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is a calamity written about what many soldiers went through when they came home from war and Salinger saw how PTSD was unpredictable when so many people were ignorant about its seriousness which is the underlying meaning of this story. 