A Perfect Day For Bananafish Analysis

Psychache is a term coined by suicidologist Edwin Shneidman. Psychache refers to an unbearable psychological pain -- “hurt, anguish, soreness, aching, psychological pain in the psyche, the mind” (Shneidman 51). It can refer to anything like the pain of excessive guilt, humiliation, loneliness, fear, or anything that causes psychological pain. According to Merriam Webster Dictionary, alienation means “a withdrawing or separation of a person or a person's affections from an object or position of former attachment (“Alienation”). It results in loneliness, emptiness, and despair. In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by J.D. Salinger, Seymour Glass is a man who had just come back from fighting in a war. He cannot relate to adults, especially his wife, Muriel, and the people at the resort he is staying at who are all narcissistic and live lavishly. Seymour is the most comfortable around children, especially Sybil, whom he meets on the beach at the resort. He lives through his ideal world with Sybil full of innocence, purity, and
After his time with Sybil, readers are left with a sane side of Seymour and most of the story, he seems placid. Seymour doesn’t seem like the harmful person that Muriel’s mother described him to be until the ending when he pulls out the gun. Seymour is like a regular fish surrounded by a sea of gluttonous bananafish that want more and more bananas just like the gluttonous and materialistic people he is surrounded by. The lady in the elevator reminds him that the world he had imagined with Sybil is just that, an imagination. He realizes that the world he is living in is not innocent, pure, or curious and because he is not able to cope with reality, he escapes. He feels alienated being surrounded by these people lacking innocence, purity, and curiosity and he has such a big “psychache” that it all just led him to take his own