[Bananafish] Roots of the ever ...

[Yocum, Daniel R Civ 21 CES/CEOE]

APDFB divorced from the Glass thing would make it the sequel to For Esmé...  But a cracked troop story, although personally horrific, is just another voice in an innumerable and ancient choir.  APDFB is the first born for a whole new Seymour (Jerome David Salinger Reborn).  The isolated Seymour is the sensitive cracked Staff Sergeant X; the new Seymour is the Vedic Phoenix.  It doesn't mean that the new Seymour didn't have the Magic Foxhole experience it just means that the Magic Foxhole was not the apple that trapped the Bfish.  Magic Foxholes are simple traps for simple beasts, it took much more to tie down the new, the true(?) Seymour.  The Staff Sergeant X connection is important because a purely divine Seymour would never do, a regular Ripley's Believe It Or Not Freak, no, This Avatar had to have a man's heart.  Who would ever cry for a beastly Elephant man?  But a Joseph Merrick is quite a tragedy, full of pathos.  At least it seems so to Buddy.  A tragic hero can not remain on stage too long, for best effect he must retreat to leave the audience time to reflect, the space to reflect, reflect themselves into the gaps.

This, at least, is the Face that Buddy wants to show us on X.

Daniel


Related or not, I'm going to tell you an agonizing story. It recounts events 
far less uplifting than bathroom diary entries and far blacker than the 
wings of seraphim. Personally, I believe that such accounts (if not this one 
in particular) may have everything to do with Salinger writing 
"Bananafish" - or at least lends a fascinating dimension to the 
possibilities involved.
Kenneth