Re: Throwing Rocks

I doubt that I, a pedantic yet ignorant high school senior, can truly add a
great deal of psychoanalytical insight in this matter, but I'll try to at
least do a little bit of character analysis. Thank god for Advanced
Placement Literature classes, where one learns to assert misinformed, naive
interpretations as gospel. "Salinger masterfully utilizes irony in the
character of Seymour to bring about his deeper theme of the individual's
strugg-- sweet Jesus. Stop me now. Princeton Review's AP Lit "idea
machine" has eaten its way into my brain, eradicating any literary talent
and creativity that ever existed within me. Not that there was really any
to begin with.

Anyway, I've always thought that his motivation for throwing stones might
have been his dangerous level of sensitivity to all beautiful things. A
primary example of this includes Seymour's apologetic returning of Sybil to
shore despite her insistence that she has not "had enough" of swimming
shortly before his suicide (Nine Stories, 17). When this would occur,
Seymour always felt the necessity to escape somehow, at risk of becoming a
bananafish himself.

Charlotte Mayhew, Seymour's fellow "wise child," was the impetus behind two
of these emotionally-wrenching incidents. In his journal, Seymour mentions
a day when Charlotte runs from him outside of the It's A Wise Child studio
in a "yellow cotton dress [he] loved because it was too long for her"
(RHTRBC, 75). Seymour consistently appreciates the flaws in Charlotte as an
individual, because they make her -- a woman that he indubitably loves --
endurable to his aesthetic senses. Throwing stones at her did the same
thing: it gave Seymour the opportunity to appreciate her beauty without
becoming overly and harmfully captivated by it.

As Mattis Fishman writes in a January 13, 1998 post to Bananafish:

"In Charlotte's case, he was also overwhelmed by her perfection, and threw
the rock, *not* out any desire to hurt her, or place a blemish on this
transient world's false perfection, but rather in order to reduce the scene
of Charlotte in the driveway to one which would not overwhelm him (sorry for
the same word, but I can't find a better one here). As though to cure his
bananafever, he needed to ruin the bananas. This was a flawed reaction, an
immature one, when contrasted to his behavior in Raise High, where he
eventually gets married."

Fishman's categorization of Seymour's motivation to throwing the rock is
articulate and thoughtful, but it fails in its assertion that he is
eventually ameliorated through his marriage to Muriel. Seymour never
recovered from his banana fever. Oh, he may have suppressed it at times,
but it was a chronic illness. His encounter with Sybil at the eleventh hour
is the final symptom of his disease: oversensitivity to beauty.

Thankfully for the reader, I didn't invoke Freud during my post, as I
certainly would have been embarassed by my lack of psychological knowledge.
Instead, I came to my conclusion through archetypal reactions to beauty and
perfection. When we see a house of cards perfectly constructed, we stare at
it in awe, then feeling the need to blow it down. Same with a crème brulée
or a burning candle. We may feel this sensation on a significantly lesser
level than Seymour did, but we feel it all the same.

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Received on Thu Dec 26 23:30:28 2002