Apples to Bananas

There are many similarities between "Teddy" and "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," the last and first stories in Nine Stories. Both take place at lavish places on or near the ocean, for example. There are also lots of similarities between the main characters of these two stories, Teddy McArdle and Seymour Glass.  

Teddy and Seymour are both wise characters who are stuck in the midst of some superficial, materialistic characters. Teddy's shallow parents always cut him off when he says his observations and philosophical ideas aloud. Muriel probably cares about Seymour, but she doesn't realize how much Seymour is struggling during the story. She is so oblivious that she sleeps while he commits suicide. This puts Teddy and Seymour in similar situations, and these two characters both deal with it by running away from the superficial characters. Teddy seems to go into in his own world and focus on spirituality by himself. Seymour escapes the materialism around him by spending time with young children who don't care much about wealth.

Another similarity between "Teddy" and "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is that Teddy and Seymour both die at the end of their stories, and both seem relatively calm about death. Teddy knows he is either going to die the day the story takes place or when he's 16, so his death doesn't really surprise him. Throughout the story, he's calm whenever he talks about death. This could be because he believes in reincarnation, so death just means moving on from one life and going to the next. Seymour commits suicide, and he also doesn't appear to be afraid of death. It seems like Seymour is disgusted with materialism and since it's all around him, he believes that death is the best option.
   
Perhaps the most interesting similarity between Teddy and Seymour is that their philosophical ideas seem to be related in some ways. Teddy believes that people need to "unlearn" things that they have already learned in order to achieve spiritual enlightenment; they have to "spit out the apple." Seymour thinks that people overindulge in material pursuits and this makes them superficial; they need to "stop eating so many bananas." Both characters think that people's brains are full of thoughts that they have to remove in order to improve themselves.

Bananafish

"A Perfect Day for Bananafish" is one of my favorite short stories that we've read so far, although it is also a confusing one. I had to read this story three times before I started to understand it.

I hadn't really thought much about the title until we discussed the story in class. I'm still not quite sure what the significance of the bananafish story is, but I have come up with two possible interpretations:

1. Bananafish are like soldiers before they go to war. Just like soldiers are "normal" people, bananafish are "normal" fish--until they enter war or a banana hole. Banana holes are like wars, because both are dangerous (grenades and mines are more dangerous than bananas, but Seymour probably had to pick something that wouldn't scare Sybil). After the bananafish go into the holes, they eat lots of bananas. This might be similar to soldiers experiencing the horrors of war. The bananafish then get banana fever, the ichthyoid equivalent of PTSD. The bananafish are so crippled by their illness that they are unable to come out of the banana holes, just as many soldiers are so affected by war that they are unable to completely return to society. Unfortunately, bananafish die from banana fever just like some soldiers who are not able to adjust to society end up committing suicide.    

2. Bananafish are like "normal" people before they become materialistic. After bananafish enter banana holes, they gorge on fruit until they become so big and ill that they cannot squeeze out of the holes anymore and eventually die. This is similar to the way in which people might indulge themselves in materialistic things so much that they become shallow. Although people do not necessarily die from being too materialistic, this story makes it seem like the focus on wealth kills their personalities in some ways. Muriel, for example, is so caught up with material pursuits, as evidenced by the smells of calfskin luggage and nail-polish remover in her hotel room, that she brushes off her mother's concerns about Seymour and fails to realize that Seymour is struggling.      

What do you think the bananafish story represents?