J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is a short story published originally in the New Yorker in 1948. The story follows a couple vacationing in Florida in the 1950’s, Seymour Glass is struggling to stay sane following the traumatic stress he developed during the war. His wife, Muriel, is too caught up in the extravagance of the resort and its people to pay attention to Seymour’s weird actions. Seymour is frustrated The story abruptly ends when Seymour, after accusing a random woman in the elevator for staring at his feet, shoots himself in the face This was one of Salinger’s earlier stories and the first he published after WWII. It would become very popular landing him a contract with the New Yorker for future stories and the beginning of a chronicle of the Glass family. Despite Seymour Glass’s strange attributes, I believe J.D. Salinger used a lot of his own feelings and frustrations with materialism and isolationism that he saw in post-WWII America in order to develop Seymour’s character.

The story begins with a frantic phone call from Muriel’s mother worried about her daughter who was spending vacation with Seymour, who had just come back from the war. Muriel’s mother is worried the war has made Seymour lose his mind. Compare that to Salinger, who has a relatively long and extensive military history during the second World War. Salinger attended the Valley Forge Military Academy and was eventually drafted into the war in 1942, following the attacks on Pearl Harbor. Salinger’s military career saw him land at Utah Beach for the Battle of Normandy and also at the Battle of the Bulge. Salinger, similarly to Seymour, suffered post-traumatic stress from the war as many did of this generation, at the time it was referred to as “battle fatigue”. This fatigue was more than most might imagine, Salinger’s regiment went from 3,080 soldiers on D-Day to 1,130 less than a month later. After the war had ended, Salinger was hospitalized in Nuremberg, Germany after suffering a nervous breakdown. Salinger, who was of Jewish descent, had to see the horrors at the Munich concentration camps as counterintelligence for the allies. Writers tend to write what they know; J.D. Salinger knew first-hand the effects war could have on one man’s sanity.

In 1946, following the war, Salinger was stationed in Gunzenhausen, Germany after suffering from his nervous breakdown and still carrying a lot of baggage mentally following the war, he met German-native Sylvia Welter. Despite their cultural differences, they fell in love and he married her three months upon meeting her. Salinger and his new wife moved to her hometown in Nuremberg, Germany, her family did not approve. Salinger was not taken into the family with open arms and there was no trust between Salinger and his step parents. It is quite similar to the story as Muriel’s parents do not trust Seymour and they are afraid of him. Salinger even gave Sylvia’s uncle the novel “A Razor’s Edge” as a gift. In the story, Seymour gives a German book to his wife as a gift, while in Salinger’s life he was giving an American book to a German man. Could Salinger have written about Seymour giving a book as a gift, drawing from his own past experiences in Nuremberg? I think it is possible, but it is more clear that Salinger knew how it felt to be mistrusted in a new family.

Despite Seymour and Salinger’s shared military and mental backgrounds, the most evident resemblance among these two is their distance from the rest of the world. In “Perfect Day for a Bananafish”, Seymour feels as though he does not fit in and likes spending his time with Sybil, a young girl. Salinger likes to use certain themes more often than not in his writing. One of the story’s main themes has to do with the character’s common struggle to communicate with one another. Seymour is so warped following the war the only person he feels comfortable talking to is a young little girl. Muriel ignores her mother’s wishes to help Seymour talk to a doctor to help him. Seymour Glass just wants to get away from everyone in his life because he is so tired of the world he sees around him. Salinger, famously avoided the fame and starting in the 1950’s started to close off his ties to the world and move to a log cabin in Cornish, New Hampshire. Salinger wrote a story about a man struggling after the war who just wants to escape the world and liberate himself from all the materialistic views that haunt our modern U.S. society. The best example where Salinger implements his past into the story of Seymour is when he is talking about the bananafish to Sybil. Seymour tells Sybil about the bananafish and how they can go into a banana hole and eat as many as seventy-eight bananas. When Sybil asks what happens when they cannot get out of the hole, Seymour says “Well, I hate to tell you, Sybil. They die." "Why?" asked Sybil. "Well, they get banana fever. It's a terrible disease.” This illustrates how Salinger is able to describe horrors that soldiers like himself endured without coming right out and saying it. This powerful type of writing can only be done when war is fresh in the author’s mind. If the story was originally published in 1948, many of the events in Salinger’s life that are similar to Seymour’s have all happened very recently, scars still fresh. For these reasons, Seymour Glass will always be considered a well-developed character, but it is important to keep in mind it is because Salinger took from his own past experiences that Seymour’s character has become timeless.