Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Included is the Matron of Honor, a loud and burly woman whom Buddy meets in a car leaving the site of the wedding.

The other passengers (who include the Matron of Honor's husband Robert; Muriel's father's deaf-mute uncle; and a middle-aged woman named Helen Silsburn) spend most of the car ride unaware of Buddy's family relation to the missing groom.

The message itself begins with a line taken from Sappho's fragment LP 111: Raise high the roof beam, carpenters.

[2]Seymour: An Introduction was also originally published in The New Yorker in 1959,[3] four years after Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.

As the title suggests, the story represents an attempt by Buddy Glass to introduce the reader to his brother Seymour, who had committed suicide in 1948.