A Perfect Day for Bananafish

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A Perfect Day for Bananafish is a short story by the American writer JD Salinger , which was first published in the New Yorker on January 31, 1948, as the opening story in 1953 in the Nine Stories Collection .

The first German translation by Elisabeth Schnack was published in 1966 under the title A glorious day for banana fish in the anthology Neun Erzählungen in collaboration with Annemarie and Heinrich Böll . In 2012 the story was published in a new translation of the Nine Stories by Eike Schönfeld under the title An ideal day for banana fish .

A Glorious Day for Banana Fish is the first of Salinger's stories about the Glass family to address the background and motives for the suicide of war veteran Seymour Glass in March 1948 while on convalescence leave with his wife Muriel in Florida after returning from World War II and the Discharge from a nervous sanatorium .

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In A Perfect Day for Bananafish , a neutral personal narrator describes the processes and events that ended with Seymour's suicide in three clearly structured sequences in a predominantly scenic-dialogical form of representation.

The story is set in a luxury resort on the Florida coast. The opening scene shows Seymour's wife Muriel waiting to be connected for a long distance call with her mother in her hotel room while her husband is alone on the beach. Muriel, wearing only a white silk dressing gown, uses the longer waiting time before the connection is established for various rather trivial activities. For example, she reads an article in a women's magazine with the title Sex is Fun - or hell , removes a stain from her skirt, puts a button on her designer blouse or paints her fingernails.

In the subsequent phone call, Muriel's mother repeatedly expressed her great concern for the safety and well-being of her daughter, as Muriel's husband Seymour had repeatedly behaved very strangely and unpredictably after his discharge from the clinic. Muriel's mother suggests, among other things, that Seymour deliberately drove his father-in-law's car into a tree, said horrific things to grandma about her preparation for death and did something unspeakable with the holiday pictures from Bermuda. In her opinion, Seymour was discharged from the military hospital much too early and is now in danger of becoming “completely insane” and a danger to those around him, as a psychoanalyst friend of his family has also discovered. She therefore very much wishes that Muriel return home, as she fears that her husband might harm her.

However, Muriel reassures her mother several times and points out that Seymour drove very carefully on the way to the resort, wanted to pay for the damage to her father's car and, moreover, spent his time at the resort lying alone on the beach during the day and Playing the piano in the evening in the hotel's Ocean Room to entertain the other guests.

In any case, she has no desire to break off the vacation; Seymour had described her as "Miss Intellectual Tramp of 1948" ("Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948") and did not take off his bathrobe on the beach - allegedly in order not to show his non-existent tattoos; However, a conversation with a local psychiatrist about Seymour's problems did not reveal anything concrete.

Throughout the entire call, Muriel conspicuously steers the conversation towards superficial issues such as her sunburn and the sunscreen used, her blue coat and ball gown, summer fashion or the clothing prices of the season in general. She also expresses herself disparagingly about the appearance and behavior of other hotel guests.

The tempting offer of her parents to finance her a nice sea voyage instead of the vacation with her husband, can not persuade Muriel to break off the vacation with Seymour. Seymour's behavior is completely harmless from her point of view and by no means, as her mother puts it, “completely crazy”. Muriel then ends the phone conversation by stating that she feels completely safe and that her husband's behavior is by no means frightening.

In the second scene of the story, the scene changes to the hotel beach. Four- or five-year-old Sybil Carpenter asks her mother several times while she is rubbing her with suntan oil whether she has seen “see more glass”. However, her mother does not understand the question and, annoyed, sends her daughter away to play in order to have a cocktail herself in the hotel.

Unsupervised, Sybil immediately goes in search of her friend Seymour Glass and finally finds him a quarter of a mile away on the public beach where Seymour has withdrawn from the hotel guests. In the conversation that follows, Seymour praises the girl's pretty blue swimsuit, although it is clearly yellow, as Sybil immediately objects. She also complains that Seymour allowed three and a half year old Sharon Lipschutz to sit next to him on the piano bench while he was playing the piano. When Seymour confirms that Sybil, not Sharon, is his favorite, she asks him to push Sharon off the piano bench the next time.

When the two go into the water together with a rubber raft, Seymour suggests that the girl look out for a banana fish. He notes that it is a wonderful day for banana fish. He explains to Sybil, who at first cannot see a banana fish, that banana fish look like ordinary fish. They would swim in a hole full of bananas and devour them greedily like pigs. Of course, they are then too thick to get out of the hole again. Trapped in the banana hole, they would develop a terrible disease, banana fever, and die from it.

Despite her initial doubts, Sybil finally explains that she saw a banana fish with six bananas in its mouth. When Seymour kisses the instep of her foot, Sybil protests angrily and, after both of them are back on the beach, immediately runs back to the hotel without a word of regret.

Seymour then collects his things and also returns to the hotel. On the way to his room, he accuses a woman with zinc ointment on her nose in the elevator of staring at his feet. When she excused her that she just happened to look at the floor, Seymour angrily forbids her “god-damned sneak”. The woman then leaves the elevator without looking back. Seymour angrily again stresses to the elevator operator that he has two normal feet and that there is not the slightest reason to stare.

Arriving in the hotel room, Seymour looks at his wife, who is sleeping on one of the two beds. Then he takes a 7.65 caliber Ortgies pistol out of his case, sits down on the unused bed and shoots himself through his right temple while looking at his wife .

Interpretative approach

In Salinger's short story, which lasts only a few hours and is rounded off while maintaining a temporal-spatial unity and manageable restriction to three main characters , and at the end returns in a circle to the starting point in the hotel room, the seemingly senseless or motivated suicide of the protagonist Seymour Glass becomes described. Since the narrator renounces any interpretation or commentary on the events in the predominantly dialogical presentation of the events and also omits the background or prehistory, the reader is put into the role of a casual observer who only hints at the characters' motives and especially the protagonist in the conversations between the characters themselves.

The long distance conversation between Muriel Glass and her mother in the first part of the story gives the reader important clues about the protagonist Seymour. The mother's various allusions to Seymour's unusual behavior after his discharge from the mental health facility and the family psychoanalyst's assessment that Seymour might soon lose control of himself, point to a state of unresolved, deep psychological confusion after Seymour's return home War. Muriel's observations that Seymour does not take off his bathrobe on the beach in order not to flaunt his non-existent tattoos are just as uncomfortable as her observation that Seymour isolates himself from the other guests in the evening at the hotel and plays the piano alone .

The phone call between Muriel and her mother not only provides a first impression of Seymour's psychological situation, but also an insight into Muriel's character. Obviously self-assured and controlled, Muriel waited for her husband during the war and during Seymour's subsequent stay in the clinic and held on to the relationship against her parents' advice. Although she is aware of the danger involved, she also let Seymour drive the car on the trip to the holiday resort and is also not ready to break off the joint (convalescent) vacation with her husband, despite the worries and fears of her parents. In this respect, Muriel shows herself to be a self-controlled or independent and extremely strong-willed young woman; at the same time, however, she creates the impression of a superficial personality who is primarily interested in material luxury and superficial everyday trivia. Seymour's designation as "Miss Intellectual Vagabond of 1948" she acknowledges in a significant way with a mere giggle; she cannot share her husband's literary interest in the great works of world literature. She shows no interest in the volume of poems by Rilkes (“those German poems”) that Seymour sent her from Germany to read. If Seymour is concerned with the poems of “the only great poet of the century”, she does not want to deal with the difficult-to-understand statements of Rilke's elegies about the painful situation of man in the Deal with the world, has published the book and is characteristically reading a rather shallow magazine story about "Sex is fun - or hell".

Muriel's dealings with her husband are accordingly not characterized by an effort to respond to Seymour's thoughts or feelings with empathy or understanding; For them, as self-confident healthy people, Seymour remains an eccentric who is fundamentally misunderstood in his deviations from the normal and is only pitiful. This also corresponds to the scenery and atmosphere of the hotel, which were initially sketched with a few suggestive hints. In the hotel overcrowded with advertising experts who use all the telephone lines ("ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel monopolizing the long-distance lines"), people play bingo in the evening or meet for a non-binding conversation at the hotel bar.

Little Black Sambo, illustration by John Rea Neill, 1908

After his war experience, Seymour is completely alienated from this world and withdraws into a completely different, self-created (inner) world, which expresses itself as an independent area of ​​dreamy fantasy and childlike innocence. As a returnee from the war, Seymour has broken out of the fabric of the conventional adult world; at the level of his childhood fantasy world he meets Sybil Carpenter, the small, unthinking girl of the fairy-tale world in Helen Banner's children's book The Little Black Sambo ( Little Black Sambo ) is arrested.

In this world, removed from the logic of everyday life, See more ( See more , homophonic in the English original with the pronunciation of Seymour's name) and the "seeing" Sybil, whose name refers to the prophetess Sibylle in the, who is gifted with a view into the future Greek mythology references.

Ironically , Seymour, depicted in the opening scene as mentally disturbed and almost dangerous to the public, shows himself here on the remote beach as the fatherly, caring friend of a neglected little girl, whose mother in the story, like Seymour's wife Muriel, portrays the superficial, materialistic, trivial everyday reality of the glamorous , self -centered reality Is to be assigned to hotel guests.

When the two go into the water, Seymour tells the girl the fictional story of the banana fish, which as an allegory or parable in the fate of this fantasy fish reflects its own situation and can be interpreted in different ways by the reader in detail. For example, the imprisonment of the banana fish can be interpreted as a paradigm for Seymour's own situation, which is itself overloaded with its own experiences, sensations and feelings and can no longer break out of the prison of its psychological inner world and return to the reality of the social outer world. Likewise, sexual connotations can also be found in the parable , which in literary analysis have been interpreted as an expression of Seymour's "sexual inadequacy" (German: "sexual inadequacy or feelings of inferiority ").

On a symbolic level of meaning, the parable of the banana-fish can also be understood or retranslated in such a way that the human being in general or Seymour in particular tragically , after being driven out of the world of childlike innocence by the urge for knowledge and experience into the world who dared the adult out, cannot go back. Figuratively speaking, the “Gate of Innocence” that he has passed has become too narrow for a return after the entanglements in the adult world and the experiences and disillusions that went with it; the way back is therefore closed; like the banana fish, the human being or Seymour must have the "diseases of this world", i. H. the "banana fever", endured and will inevitably perish from his experiences or experiences.

If the parable is understood in this sense as Seymour's clear diagnosis of his own situation, he is no longer a mere psychopath or mentally disturbed person who, due to his mental illness, can no longer participate in a regular and orderly everyday life. In contrast, he presents himself as someone who sees through the tragedy and mistakes of this world and sees more than those who remain on the surface in their perception and thoughts. What appears to be a mental disorder or illness from the point of view of normality turns out to be an attempt to escape the constraints of conformity of the standardized course of everyday reality in this world. In this regard, Seymour's endeavors to regain his own innocence, which has been lost primarily through the war experience, through friendship with the still innocent, childlike Sybil or Sharon, is also conclusive. Seymour is aware, however, that this attempt is doomed to failure: the air mattress that he takes into the water is not sufficiently filled with air. When Sybil, who is seeing or looking into the future, draws his attention to the fact that the rubber raft needs more air, he replies: “You are right. It takes more air than I'm willing to admit. ”(“ You're right. It needs more air than I'm willing to admit. ”). The attempted return to the world of childhood takes place against his better judgment, it is no longer possible for him to assimilate Sybil. The “more-seeing” Seymour and the future-looking Sybil remain irreconcilably separated at another crucial point: Seymour himself wears royal blue swimming trunks; when he describes Sybil's bathing suit as blue, however, this corrects his statement: her bathing suit is canary yellow, but not blue.

When Seymour Sybil, in his renewed attempt to get closer to her childish world, invites her on his imaginary journey to the banana fish, after a moment she hesitates as a matter of course, and with her finding that she has a banana fish Seen a fish with six bananas in its mouth, but at the same time it was clear that the boundaries between fantasy and reality are blurred in their childlike play world; appearance becomes so for them. Seymour has to recognize here that as an adult, whose ideas are determined by the “rules of logic” and “conditions of reality”, he cannot forget that this banana-fish story is made up, an attempt to break out of the imagination, not however the reality. The only half-filled rubber raft can carry the child Sybil, but not the adult Seymour, who remains stuck on the ground of reality.

At the moment when Sybil accepts his fantasy as reality, Seymour kisses Sybil's foot, as it were impulsively; Seen figuratively, Sybil, who is floating on the water on the rubber raft, has thus detached herself from the bottom of the earth and left the real world in which Seymour sees himself trapped. Sybil, however, cannot understand Seymour's gesture of admiration and adoration at this point; she protests angrily and runs back to the hotel. With this, Seymour's attempt to approach the child's world fails again; All that remains for him on the way back to the hotel is the depressing realization that he himself can no longer remove the boundaries between fantasy and reality like a child. As an earth-bound “Capricorn” ( Capricorn ), he remains “tied to the ground of the facts” and cannot escape the real world.

In the scene in the hotel elevator, Seymour's insight into his inevitable imprisonment in this world of reality is expressed in his disgust at his own feet, which, as it were, symbolically remind him of his real physicality. In his suffering he returns to the hotel room, which smells of “new calfskin suitcases and nail polish remover” (“new calfskin luggage and nail-laquer remover”). These fashionable characteristics of a superficial holiday amusement make clear to him again the cage from which he cannot break out. The only way out with the “determination” of the one “who has finally recognized his situation” is to put a bullet through the head on this “glorious day for banana fish” to get the one out of his Visibility to take the only possible path that leads him out of the “hole” in the world in which he is trapped.

In this regard, Salinger gives in his narrative in "dramatically condensed [r], shaped down to the last detail and poetically exaggerated [r]" form to the unspeakable suffering of a sensitive outsider in a "pragmatically oriented", superficial materialistic world its literary expression.

History of origin

In January 1947, Salinger submitted a manuscript entitled "The Bananafish" to the New Yorker for publication after a previously submitted short story was rejected. The submitted manuscript aroused the interest of the editor William Maxwell , who informed Salinger's agents on January 22nd that he liked the submission very much in parts, but still showed significant weaknesses ("major flaws"), since it had neither a coherent story nor a understandable meaning (“seems to us to lack any discoverable story or point”). In a subsequent personal conversation with Salinger, Maxwell explained to the writer that the editorial staff appreciated his stylistic precision and his talent for natural, melodious dialogues (“gift for dialogue which flowed naturally and was pleasing to the ear”) ; the text is also written excellently, the statement or meaning is not clearly recognizable ("excellently written but [...] at the same time unintelligible").

Salinger then decided to thoroughly revise the original manuscript and first added the opening scene with Seymour's wife Muriel. Gradually, in a year-long change process in which numerous different versions were created, he added essential parts of the story, especially with regard to the portrayal and characterization of Muriel, in constant consultation with the editors of the New Yorker . In January 1948, the New Yorker adopted the last revised version of the text, which was to appear under the title A Fine Day for Bananafish .

However, in New York there was a lack of clarity as to whether Bananafish should be written together or separately. In a letter to the editors of the New Yorker , Salinger then stated that he wanted the spelling together, since for him “two words would make too much sense”. The editor in charge in the New Yorker finally accepted Salinger's logic, but changed the title of the story when it was first published on January 31, 1948 to A Perfect Day for Bananafish .

This background of the genesis of the final text shows not only the former, intensive cooperation Salinger with the editors and the editing of the New Yorker , but also shows the way in which Salinger therefore tried this short story, which by no means in a litter or an inspiration to refine and develop step by step. In the German first translation by Elisabeth Schnack, on the other hand, the separate spelling of banana fish was chosen in two words, albeit with a hyphen.

History of impact and background

After the unprecedented first success of The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, Salinger apparently tried to preserve his early work in 1953 with the collective publication of his early short stories, which he had previously published in magazines, in book form under the title Nine Stories . The opening story A Perfect Day for Bananafish in particular met with broad, almost exclusively positive, critical feedback. The narrow volume of short stories, which had sold more than two million copies by 1963, remained - extremely unusual for a short story volume - on the New York Times bestseller list for over three months and made Salinger one of the most important authors of American literature of the 20th century. Above all, the publication of A Perfect Day for Bananafish together with the other stories as an anthology finally secured Salinger a “leading place in the history of American post-war literature” after the successful first publication of The Catcher in the Rye .

A Perfect Day for Bananafish opens the cycle of the Glass saga with the introduction of the protagonist Seymour Glass , which Salinger then completed at very long intervals in the period up to 1965 with stories about one or the other member of the Glass family. The background and prehistory of the fate of Seymour Glass are mainly illustrated in the short story collections Franny and Zooey ( Franny and Zooey ) (1961) and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction (1963) ( Lifts the roof beam, carpenter and Seymour is introduced ) gradually added. Whether Salinger had already conceived the entire history of the Glass family when he wrote A Perfect Day for Bananafish , or whether he only created the other figures of the Glass family afterwards in a form that continued or developed the early approaches step by step, cannot be answered unequivocally from today's literary perspective.

Although the character of Seymour Glass in A glorious day for banana fish in particular was deepened and expanded through the later cycle, this narrative is nonetheless a self-contained and well-formed short story, which is also independent of the context of the other Glass stories as well as effect unfolds and is to be understood solely from within.

Thus, A Perfect Day for Banana Fish seen in the criticism unanimously as an independent "successful work of art" and is considered one of the "Best Stories" Salinger. Since Salinger's conception of the narrative character Seymour has changed in the stories that were created seven years later, these subsequently written stories cannot be used as a starting point for an interpretation of A glorious day for banana fish .

Regardless of this, the biographical data of the narrative character Seymour can be reconstructed from the later stories . As a result, Seymour was born in 1917 and attended Columbia University at the age of fifteen , where he received his Ph.D. in English. At the age of nineteen he started teaching, at twenty-one he became a university professor. On June 4, 1942, Seymour married Muriel Fedder, who was rather simple and in no way shared his interests. Due to his experiences at the front as a soldier in World War II, he lost his mental balance; subsequent psychoanalytic treatment in an army hospital is unsuccessful. In an even more confused state than before, he spends convalescence with his wife in Florida, where he shot himself in his hotel room on March 18, 1948.

The fact that the story A Perfect Day for Bananafish , in which Seymour's suicide is described, was first published in the New Yorker in January 1948, i.e. two months before the depicted suicide , can probably only be explained by an inadvertence of Salinger.

In A glorious day for banana fish , Salinger develops a narrative form with the restriction to a few actors, the spatial and temporal unit as well as the division of the course of action and the events into three clearly separated acts, which he also uses as a narrative basic structure in several of his early short stories, for example used in Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut (first published in March 1948, German Uncle Wackelpeter in Connecticut ) or Down at the Dinghy (first published in April 1949, German down at the boat ).

Thematically, Salinger also expresses his criticism of the materialistic world of abundance and consumerism in post-war American society in A wonderful day for banana fish . The initial reference in the narrative to the hotel occupied by advertising professionals indicates the growing influence of advertising and marketing campaigns , especially for luxury items and magazines, especially for the target group of American women after the end of the war and the economic depression . For a returnee from the war like Salinger himself or his protagonist Seymour in A Perfect Day for Bananafish , who are returning from a destroyed Europe, experiencing this stark contrast between destruction and deprivation on the one hand and abundance and waste on the other leads to a feeling of discomfort and disorientation . This criticism of the materialistic American consumer society takes Salinger literary history a development in the post-modern literature anticipate that essentially when mainstream -literature only 10 years after the release of A Perfect Day for Banana Fish spreads early 60s. In this respect, Salinger's story lays an early cornerstone for a critical literary movement against the establishment , as expressed in the contemporary works of Jack Kerouac and Thomas Wolfe , who both use outsiders or antiheroes as protagonists.

literature

  • Peter Freese : Suffering from reality: the disease of banana fever. In: Peter Freese: The American Short Story after 1945. Athenaeum Verlag, 1974, ISBN 3-7610-1816-9 , pp. 150–161.
  • Peter Freese: JD Salinger's Nine Stories · An interpretation of the early Glass stories. In: Paul Gerhard Buchloh et al. (Ed.): American stories from Hawthorne to Salinger · Interpretations. Kiel Contributions to English and American Studies, Volume 6. Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1968, pp. 242–283, here in particular pp. 253–262. Also reprinted in: Peter Freese: The American Short Story • The American Short Story. Collected Essays • Collected Essays . Langenscheidt-Longman Verlag, Munich 1999, pp. 195–232.
  • Ihab Hassan: The Individual Talent JD Salinger: Rare Quixotic Gesture. In: Ihab Hassan: Radical Innocence Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. Harper & Row, New York 1966, pp. 259–289, here in particular p. 267 ff.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Peter Freese : JD Salinger's Nine Stories · An interpretation of the early Glass stories . In: Paul Gerhard Buchloh et al. (Ed.): American stories from Hawthorne to Salinger · Interpretations. Kiel Contributions to English and American Studies Volume 6 . Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1968, p. 249 ff. The other stories of Salinger about the Glass family were also z. First published in the New Yorker and then, inter alia, in the anthologies Franny and Zooey (Franny and Zooey) (1961) and Lifts the Roof Beam Up, Carpenter and Seymour is introduced (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction) (1963 ) published.
  2. ↑ See Peter Freese : JD Salinger's Nine Stories · An interpretation of the early Glass stories . In: Paul G. Buchloh et al. (Ed.): American stories from Hawthorne to Salinger · Interpretations. Kiel Contributions to English and American Studies Volume 6 . Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1968, p. 253 f.
  3. ↑ See Peter Freese : JD Salinger's Nine Stories · An Interpretation of the Early Glass Stories . In: Paul G. Buchloh et al. (Ed.): American stories from Hawthorne to Salinger · Interpretations. Kiel Contributions to English and American Studies Volume 6 . Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1968, p. 255 f. Likewise Peter Freese : Suffering from reality: the disease of banana fever . In: Peter Freese: The American Short Story after 1945 . Athenäum Verlag, 1974, ISBN 3-7610-1816-9 , p. 15 ff. Also Kenneth Slawenski: JD Salinger - A Life . Random House Trade Paperbacks, New York 2012, ISBN 978-08129-8259-6 , pp. 160 f.
  4. ↑ Helen Bannermann: The little black sambo: A funny negro story . Translated by Hertha Schröder. Oldenburg 1928. A new edition of the German translation was published by Carlsen Verlag , Reinbek b. Hamburg 1984, ISBN 3-551-51280-9 , published.
  5. ↑ See Peter Freese : JD Salinger's Nine Stories · An Interpretation of the Early Glass Stories . In: Paul G. Buchloh et al. (Ed.): American stories from Hawthorne to Salinger · Interpretations. Kiel Contributions to English and American Studies Volume 6 . Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1968, p. 257 f. The allusion in the name of Sybil to the seer from Greek mythology is reinforced by Salinger through intertextual references to TS Eliot's long poem The Waste Land . When Sybil directs the conversation to her rival Sharon, Seymour replies with a quote from The Waste Land : "Mixing Memory and Desire" ("Awakens memory and longing"). This poem by Eliot is preceded by an introduction in Greek that refers to the Sibyl of Cumae . See more precisely Peter Freese : Suffering from reality: the disease of banana fever . In: Peter Freese: The American Short Story after 1945 . Athenäum Verlag, 1974, ISBN 3-7610-1816-9 , p. 154, and Kenneth Slawenski: JD Salinger - A Life . Random House Trade Paperbacks, New York 2012, ISBN 978-08129-8259-6 , pp. 160 f.
  6. ↑ See the more detailed information and evidence from Peter Freese on the different interpretative approaches in the previous interpretations of the banana-fish parable : JD Salinger's Nine Stories · An interpretation of the early Glass stories . In: Paul G. Buchloh et al. (Ed.): American stories from Hawthorne to Salinger · Interpretations. Kiel Contributions to English and American Studies Volume 6 . Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1968, p. 258 f. In spite of the different interpretations in detail, as Freese shows, all interpretive approaches assume that Seymour " projects his own situation into the fate of the fish he invented ".
  7. ↑ See Peter Freese on this interpretation : JD Salinger's Nine Stories · An interpretation of the early Glass stories . In: Paul G. Buchloh et al. (Ed.): American stories from Hawthorne to Salinger · Interpretations. Kiel Contributions to English and American Studies Volume 6 . Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1968, p. 259.
  8. ↑ See Peter Freese : JD Salinger's Nine Stories · An Interpretation of the Early Glass Stories . In: Paul G. Buchloh et al. (Ed.): American stories from Hawthorne to Salinger · Interpretations. Kiel Contributions to English and American Studies Volume 6 . Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1968, p. 259 f.
  9. ↑ See Peter Freese : JD Salinger's Nine Stories · An interpretation of the early Glass stories . In: Paul G. Buchloh et al. (Ed.): American stories from Hawthorne to Salinger · Interpretations. Kiel Contributions to English and American Studies Volume 6 . Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1968, p. 259 ff.
  10. ↑ Cf. more precisely Peter Freese : Suffering from reality: the disease of banana fever . In: Peter Freese: The American Short Story after 1945 . Athenaeum Verlag, 1974, ISBN 3-7610-1816-9 , pp. 158-161.
  11. ↑ See Peter Freese : JD Salinger's Nine Stories · An interpretation of the early Glass stories . In: Paul G. Buchloh et al. (Ed.): American stories from Hawthorne to Salinger · Interpretations. Kiel Contributions to English and American Studies Volume 6 . Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1968, p. 261 ff. See also Ihab Hassan: The Individual Talent · JD Salinger: Rare Quixotic Gesture . In: Ihab Hassan: Radical Innocence Studies in the Contemporary American Novel . Harper & Row, New York 1966, pp. 259-289, here pp. 267 f.
  12. ↑ See in detail Kenneth Slawenski: JD Salinger - A Life . Random House Trade Paperbacks, New York 2012, ISBN 978-08129-8259-6 , p. 158 f.
  13. ↑ See the information and evidence from Peter Freese : JD Salingers Nine Stories · An interpretation of the early Glass stories. In: Paul G. Buchloh et al. (Ed.): American stories from Hawthorne to Salinger · Interpretations. Kiel Contributions to English and American Studies, Volume 6. Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1968, pp. 241, 245 f.
  14. ↑ See the information and evidence from Peter Freese: JD Salingers Nine Stories · An interpretation of the early Glass stories. In: Paul G. Buchloh et al. (Ed.): American stories from Hawthorne to Salinger · Interpretations. Kiel Contributions to English and American Studies, Volume 6. Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1968, pp. 249 f., 252 f.
  15. ↑ See e.g. As the assessment of Paul Ingendaay : JD Salinger is ninety - "Do with it what you want!" . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , September 1, 2009. Accessed June 13, 2014.
  16. ↑ See Peter Freese: JD Salinger's Nine Stories · An interpretation of the early Glass stories. In: Paul G. Buchloh et al. (Ed.): American stories from Hawthorne to Salinger · Interpretations. Kiel Contributions to English and American Studies, Volume 6. Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1968, pp. 247 f., 249 f., P. 252 f.
  17. ↑ See Peter Freese: JD Salinger's Nine Stories · An interpretation of the early Glass stories. In: Paul G. Buchloh et al. (Ed.): American stories from Hawthorne to Salinger · Interpretations. Kiel Contributions to English and American Studies, Volume 6. Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1968, p. 249 f.
  18. ↑ See Peter Freese: JD Salinger's Nine Stories · An interpretation of the early Glass stories. In: Paul G. Buchloh et al. (Ed.): American stories from Hawthorne to Salinger · Interpretations. Kiel Contributions to English and American Studies, Volume 6. Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1968, pp. 263 ff., 271 ff. Sybil Carpenter, like the protagonist in Uncle Wiggily, also comes from the fictional place Whirly Wood in Connecticut .
  19. ↑ See the presentation in the section Historical Context in the Spark Notes: A Perfect Day for Bananafish. (see web links).