![]() The movie uses a running gambit of an actor as a Salinger-figure who types and worries in an empty theater. But for people-watchers, documentary-lovers and Salinger fans, the movie should be more than satisfying.īoth movie and book have odd structures. The audience is faced with a genuine curiosity: not a movie made from a book, but the same story told by the same people two ways, onscreen for two hours and in print for 700 pages.īoth versions are fascinating - and a little too long. The coauthors of the book, David Shields and Shane Salerno, are also co-writers for the movie, and Salerno is the director. Was he hiding unpublished masterpieces? Why so secret? The first answers are just now arriving.Ī new documentary movie, “Salinger,” opens this Friday, timed to coincide with the publication of a book of the same title. When he died in 2010, at the age of 91, the famously reclusive author of “The Catcher in the Rye” left behind a decades-old question: What had he really been doing for the past 40 years? Rumors swirled about Salinger writing every day. Maybe it's better to walk away from "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" with an emotional or spiritual reaction, rather than an analytical one.This article first appeared in the St. And this is certainly a legitimate approach to the text. If you buy into this theory, you might very well take issue with all the "deep hidden meaning" conclusions that critics have drawn and that we've explored in "Symbols, Imagery, Allegory." You might think that it's the wrong approach to assign any one meaning to each of the metaphors and images in this text (like the bananafish, the color blue, the nail polish). Perhaps we're meant to meditate on this and the other stories in the collection, but we're not meant to "figure out" what the "answer" is. ![]() There may be an answer to his question, but it's not one that anyone could write down or explain in a thesis paper. And, of course, the big question in "Bananafish" is…why does Seymour kill himself? It's very possible that Salinger intends his story as a sort of kōan in itself. This epigraph reminds us that some questions – actually, the most important questions, spiritually speaking – don't have logical answers. The epigraph provides the author with an opportunity to give us a hint (or sometimes tell us directly) how to interpret his writing. What does this have to do with "A Perfect Day for Bananafish"? Remember that the point of an epigraph is to inform the way we read a work. In other words, you can't Google the answer to this one. But it's not a logical answer that you could explain to someone else. What is the sound of one hand clapping? If you meditate on this long enough, claim the Zen Buddhists, you will come up with an answer. If we ask you, "What is the square root of 435?" you can solve the problem using the usual parts of your brain (or a handy calculator). But the answer to the riddle isn't logical. A kōan is a sort of riddle, as you can see from this particular example. Knowledge is pointless, she says, unless it ultimately leads to wisdom. ![]() Their goal is to amass as much of it as quickly as possible, which Franny finds no more noble than trying to amass wealth, fame, or any material good. ![]() Similarly, in Salinger's novel Franny and Zooey, college student Franny Glass (Seymour's younger sister) complains that in school, they learn nothing but this useless knowledge. To get at those, you have to "empty yourself" of all logical truths. His theory is that we are all so distracted and filled up with the useless things we learn in school – like math and science and grammar and logic – that we don't open ourselves to real spiritual truths. These two works book-end Nine Stories, literally and thematically, and "Teddy" really informs the way that we read and interpret "Bananafish." In "Teddy," for example, the titular character, an enlightened young man and spiritual prodigy, explains to a college student the way that knowledge works. If this stuff interests you, we'd recommend reading "Bananafish" and "Teddy" (the final piece in the Nine Stories collection) together. While Eastern philosophy isn't explicitly discussed in "Bananafish," it's easy to see a spiritual theme reflected in the story. But what is the sound of one hand clapping? – A Zen Kōan This is the epigraph to Nine Stories, the 1953 collection that opens with "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." Together, these nine stories explore themes of innocence, youth, the psychological effects of war, and Eastern philosophy. ![]()
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