[Bananafish] Nine Stories

[James Rovira]

God forbid, Michael, that any single word of ours is less than
absolutely creative, brilliant, and original.  Maybe most people read
the story that way because that's the best way to read the story?

Innovation boils down to idiocy pretty rapidly.  Just read a lot of
literary criticism.  Sometimes it's pretty good, but...

Anyway, Terry seems to be asking a more specific question than the one
I tried to answer.  It's a really good question, I think.  I think the
whole last paragraph is about conscience.  The cigarette slips out of
the old man's hands because his hands are trembling -- guilt.  He
snaps at the girl for the same reason -- guilt.  The epithet "for
chrissakes" could be taken a little bit more literally than usual
here.  And maybe it's an attempt by the old guy to control the
situation. You could read the burning cigarette falling into the bed
as a symbol of a potentially "explosive" situation, a situation that
could cause them all to "all go up in flames" or something like that.

That'd be my first guess on the last paragraph.  Looking back, it's
not too different from Michael's.  Dang...I wasn't original again....

Jim