A Perfect Day for Bananafish-- J.D. Salinger
“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by J.D. Salinger is the story of a young couple, Seymour and Muriel Glass, who are on vacation in Florida following some tension caused by Seymour’s behavior after coming back from the army. The story is short, only seven pages long, but there is still a clear correlation between Seymour’s distress and his contact with the industrial, consumerist world, which is personified by his wife.
Muriel calls her mother, who is worried for her daughter’s safety around her husband, referencing “that funny business with the trees” and “what he did with all those lovely pictures from Bermuda,” among other things (1, 2). During this conversation, Seymour is spending time on the beach with a child, Sybil, whose innocence and simple pleasures with the natural world are refreshing to him. He becomes disgusted by himself and his behavior towards Sybil and returns to the hotel room, where he commits suicide with a gun. This story has often been read as being about how communication issues lead to alienation and distress. I think that energy afterlives can be seen as contributing to these themes as well.
Nearly every description of Muriel, as well as the bulk of her conversation with her mother over the phone, centers on behaviors and topics that only exist in a post-industrial world. Muriel's very essence and the air around her “[smells] of new calfskin luggage and nail-lacquer remover” (7). The only interaction she has with another person, in fact, is over the telephone from her hotel room. She is effectively isolated from the other characters in a world of her own making. Seymour clearly resents her for her interests and materialistic tendencies, and his attempts to “culture” her with poetry have failed.
Sybil, being a child, is yet untouched by much of the shallowness and frivolity with which Muriel is affected, and Seymour much prefers her company to that of his wife. The second half of the story, when Sybil and Seymour spend time on the beach, includes very few references to energy afterlives. It is only when Seymour becomes distressed and returns to the hotel that they become frequent again.
I calculated the percentage of sentences that reference energy afterlives (EA) on each page of the story, and then I classified each EA sentence as being either positive, neutral, or negative. 73% of the sentences on page one, where Muriel calls her mother, reference energy afterlives. Of these references, I classified 44% of them as neutral. As she waits for her call to be connected, she reads an article in a magazine, lacquers her nails, and washes a comb. None of these are particularly stressful, though there are a lot of them.
From the second half of page one through the first half of page four, Muriel and her mother talk about Seymour. On page three, I classified 56% of the EA sentences as negative. The two women reference a bad car accident, fashion trends they don't like, and Muriel's travel problems.
The story then shifts to Sybil walking across the beach from her mother to Seymour, who is lying in the sand. Of the 14% of sentences that reference energy afterlives on page five, all are neutral descriptions of surroundings or the suntan oil. Only 9% of sentences on page 6, when Seymour and Sybil talk the longest, reference energy afterlives. Seymour sarcastically talks about Muriel's frivolous pastimes and compliments Sybil's blue swimsuit — references that are negative and positive, respectively.
The story ends with a huge jump in references to EA. Seymour becomes irritated with himself and leaves Sybil behind for the hotel, where he lashes out at a woman in the elevator before returning to his room, which is full of reminders of Muriel's consumerism. He pulls out a gun, looks at Muriel sleeping in the other bed, and shoots himself. I counted 69% of sentences as referencing energy afterlives. Of those sentences, 46% were neutral descriptions of his surroundings, while 54% were negatively charged or referenced harshly in dialogue.
These graphs track both the frequency of EA sentences and their type, positive/neutral/negative, for each page. The size of the dot corresponds to the total percentage of sentences on every page that reference energy afterlives. The color palette of each line corresponds to the type of sentence: purple is neutral, positive is green, negative is red. Finally, the intensity of color shows the relative intensity of each type of sentence. For example, if a dot is almost completely green, that means almost all references on that page were positive. The legend in the left-hand corner gives a good sense of what each color means. If the dot was almost completely green and the largest on the chart, that would mean for that page, almost all sentences contained references to energy afterlives, and almost all those references were positive. For reference, the greatest percentage of energy afterlives sentences is on the first page, at 73%.
Bibliography
Salinger, J. D. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” The New Yorker, 24 Jan. 1948