Communication and Isolation Theme Analysis

In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” everyone seems isolated from one another—especially Seymour, who appears to deliberately isolate himself by playing the piano at night and going to the beach alone. For other characters, conversations and even intimate interactions are marked by a sense of alienation and disconnect, sometimes because people refuse to empathize with one another and other times because they simply can’t understand someone else’s experiences (particularly Seymour’s traumatic experience of war). While Salinger certainly makes the case that it’s difficult to communicate with people who have such different experiences, he also makes the broader point that American culture doesn’t value empathy and understanding, which leaves people lethally isolated.

In every instance of characters trying to connect, they miss each other somehow. For instance, Muriel and her mother can’t even get in touch with each other for two days, and then when they do, they talk at each other during their whole phone call instead of mutually participating in a conversation. Muriel doesn’t take her mom’s concerns seriously (even though she should), and likewise Muriel’s mom doesn’t seem to hear Muriel’s assurances that she’s okay—essentially, they communicate nothing to each other. Even more strikingly, Muriel and Seymour never once speak throughout the whole story, showing how isolating and uncommunicative their marriage is. While on the phone with her mother, Muriel recalls how Seymour sent her a book of poetry while he was away at war, but she didn’t read it—nor does she even know where she put it. With this, Muriel gestures to the idea that their entire marriage is one of failed communication and profound disconnect.

Seymour particularly struggles with effective communication and feelings of isolation. Throughout the story, Seymour is always roaming around the resort alone, set apart from others playing piano or lying on the beach by himself, and he’s rarely seen talking to anyone. Seymour’s interaction with a little girl named Sybil is the only time in the story when he has a productive conversation, but they’re talking at a child’s level. Sybil understands Seymour’s imaginative poetic side, which is an immense pleasure to him, but she can’t relate to the other parts of him, leaving him still profoundly isolated. In contrast, Seymour’s interactions with adults are marked with odd misunderstanding and even paranoia. For instance, he’s paranoid that people are looking at his nonexistent tattoo, which might be a sort of twisted way of expressing that he thinks everyone can see that he has been changed by his experiences in the army. Additionally, his interaction in the elevator (where he thinks that a woman is staring at his feet) comes just after his inappropriate fixation on Sybil’s feet and ankles, so it seems that he assumes the woman aware of this. In both of those cases, Seymour wrongly assumes that he’s less isolated than he is—that people can know something important about him when they really can’t. In actuality, nobody understands what is tormenting Seymour, which is painful for him—and his paranoia just alienates him further. There’s so much misunderstanding, miscommunication, and isolation throughout the story that it’s hard not to read Seymour’s ultimate suicide as a final attempt to communicate something to Muriel—but it’s actually not clear what that something is. Seymour doesn’t leave a note, and Salinger is fairly ambiguous about Seymour’s motivations besides making it clear that the man is socially isolated and in mental agony.

Salinger published “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” just two years after World War II came to a close, so it’s easy to see how his consortium of characters might be reflective of post-WWII American society. Through his unempathetic, uncommunicative characters, Salinger suggests that people outside the story’s pages are similarly disconnected from one another—which, as Seymour’s fate shows, can come at a great cost. Indeed, Seymour’s suffering speaks to the disconnect that soldiers often feel when coming back from war, since few civilians understand—or even try to understand—the harrowing scenes veterans have witnessed and the trauma they’ve endured. That Seymour’s death is left vague and unexplained reads like a call to action for readers to connect deeply, communicate openly, and genuinely try to understand one another’s experiences.