In "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", written by J.D Salinger, we see a man named Seymour Glass who is veteran of World War II. J.D Salinger depicts a scene where Seymour is playing on the beach with a girl named Sybil he has met at a resort in Florida. Sybil is only 5 in this story, which might already sound pretty sketchy (I mean, we're basically trained to think that a older man playing with a 5 year old girl is a little odd). But right before this scene on the beach, Salinger depicts a scene where Seymour's wife, Muriel, is having a phone conversation with her mother.
The phone conversation is just setting us up to think the scene on the beach is even more weird and it makes us think something bad is going to happen. Muriel and her mother are talking about Seymour, the mother saying she is worried about Muriel, and Muriel saying that she trusts Seymour. A lot of things are revealed about his character discreetly during this short conversation. It is alluded to that Seymour might have some sort of mental disorder and that he is not to be trusted.
This scene leads up to the one on the beach, where an innocent girl is talking to and swimming with an older man who, we now know, seems to have some mental issues and might be hard for the reader to trust now.
I think that Salinger is toying with the reader a little bit here. I think that, by arranging the story in this way, Salinger wants us to feel suspicious of Seymour on the beach. Because he clues us in to all these little details about Seymour, he inflicts this feeling of wonder about what will happen with him and Sybil.
After the scene on the beach, we see Seymour interact with a woman on the elevator. He gets really mean and defensive and, ultimately, scares away the woman. It was a side of Seymour we did not even see a glimmer of on the beach. It was a drastic change.
Then we see Seymour get back to his room. Everything seems normal, but then Seymour takes out a gun and kills himself right in front of Muriel while she is asleep.
I think Salinger puts these scenes after the beach scene for a reason as well. On the beach, we see a happy Seymour and nothing really bad happens (although it is still just a little creepy). But once off the beach and back in his real world, Seymour becomes another person. And when he kills himself, it shocks the reader because we see the more innocent Seymour tragically take his life. The stark contrast between the scenes plays with the readers emotions a little bit and even makes them want to go back and reread the story in case they missed something. I think this is a very important style that Salinger uses. He sets up the scenes in his stories in an important way and I think, while reading Nine Stories, the reader should definitely take note of that.
