When the 28-year-old Salinger submitted the manuscript to The New Yorker in January 1947, titled "The Bananafish",[2] its arresting dialogue and precise style[3] were read with interest by fiction editor William Maxwell and his staff, though the point of the story, in this original version, was considered incomprehensible.
[1] At Maxwell's urging, Salinger embarked upon a major reworking of the piece, adding the opening section with Muriel's character, and crafting the material to provide insights into Seymour's tragic demise.
[1] In frequent consultation with editor Gus Lobrano, Salinger revised the story numerous times throughout 1947, renaming it "A Fine Day for Bananafish".
"[4] Salinger's decision to collaborate with Maxwell and The New Yorker staff in developing the story marked a major advance in his career[5] and led to his entry into the echelon of elite writers at the journal.
Muriel Glass, a wealthy and self-absorbed woman, phones her mother from her suite to discuss her husband Seymour, a World War II combat veteran recently discharged from an army hospital; it is implied that he was being evaluated for a psychiatric disorder.
[8] Muriel's mother is concerned by reports of her son-in-law's increasingly bizarre and anti-social actions, and warns her daughter that the doctor said he may "lose control of himself".
Meanwhile, at the resort's adjoining beach, a child named Sybil Carpenter has been left unsupervised by her mother so that she may drink at the hotel bar.
Sybil reproaches Seymour for allowing another little girl, Sharon Lipschutz, to sit with him the previous night as he played the lounge piano for the hotel's guests.
Seymour places Sybil on a rubber raft and wades into the water, where he tells her the story of "the very tragic life" of the bananafish: they gorge themselves on bananas, become too large to escape their feeding holes, and die.
[11] After the triumph of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", Salinger allowed the New Yorker to have the first chance at printing all his subsequent writing by signing a contract with the magazine.
After sending the initial draft, "The Bananafish", to the New Yorker, Harold Ober, Salinger's agent, received a letter from William Maxwell, a fiction editor at the magazine.
This "dualism" can be found in other works of Salinger, as he repeatedly depicts life "as a battleground between the normal and abnormal, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the talentless and the gifted, the well and the sick.
"[19] Like the eldest son of the Glass family, Salinger was deeply affected by his experiences as a combat soldier in WWII, and these informed his writing.
"[10] Traumatized by the Battle of the Bulge and the Nazi concentration camps,[21] Salinger "found it impossible to fit into a society that ignored the truth that he now knew.
[emphasis added] "The Burial of the Dead" begins with an excerpt from Petronius Arbiter's Satyricon, which reads: "For once I saw with my own eyes the Cumean Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?'