Re: Carpenters...
Pierrot65@aol.com
Sun, 28 Feb 1999 11:49:14 -0500 (EST)
Seymour absolutely is THE bananafish, the masthead on which our freak flag
flies. All the talk about remembering the sight and feel of Charlotte's dress,
the appropriate sentimentality of "John Keats/John Keats/John, Please put your
scarf on" ... all the instances of Seymour's hypersensitivity to stimuli are
proof of his condition, banana fever. Seymour (or any human representative of
the bananafish in the canon) gobbles up emotional response to stimuli as the
b-fish gobbles the bananas; he gets full and explodes (commits suicide)
because he can't swim out of the hole, which here is his inability to
reconcile the beautiful or ugly stimuli with the very quotidian aspects of
everyday life. He is overwhelmed, as the fish is overfed: he is a glutton for
that innocent, perfect beauty as the fish is a glutton for that fruit. It is a
"Perfect" day for him because, by killing himself, he relieves the pressure
building up in his (emotional) guts.
Please forgive those aspects of the above which have, I'm sure, appeared all
over the list before.
rick