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Foreshadowing
Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is a short story. While brief enough to be read in a single sitting, it is a complete, self-contained narrative. It quickly introduces its characters and setting before ending in a sudden, shocking climax. However, although it stands on its own, the story is one of many J. D. Salinger wrote about the same set of characters, the Glass family, including the novella Franny and Zooey. This is the only story where Seymour, the eldest brother, actually appears, but he is often talked about in the other Glass narratives.
Salinger writes within the genre of Modernism, a literary styling that solidified in the wake of World War I. For many people in Europe and the U.S., personally witnessing destruction on a global scale shook their faith in the foundations of western culture. Instead of searching for truth and understanding, modernist writers grappled with how impossible it was to understand the true nature of anything at all. Writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce became known for their use of run-on sentences, their neglect of conventional punctuation and grammar, and their disjointed leaps of association. Salinger was a part of a later wave of Modernism, following World War II, during which he served in combat. His writing is characterized by a similar disillusionment with society, and the story refuses to form conclusions for the reader.
