Wealth and Materialism Theme Analysis

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is set at a dazzling resort along the Florida coast where upper-class guests luxuriate and indulge. Everyone is surrounded by decadent things like calfskin leather, designer clothes, silks, and fashion magazines, suggesting that the resort and its patrons are the very embodiment of upper-class refinement. But for Seymour, who has recently returned from fighting in World War II, the resort is a hellish place, brimming with shallow people who are obsessed with accruing, discussing, and showing off their wealth—people much like his own materialistic wife, Muriel. In exploring the resort-goers’ materialism and how this pushes Seymour towards suicide, Salinger stresses that greed can destroy people on both a spiritual and physical level.

The story that Seymour makes up for Sybil about the bananafish speaks to the idea that consumerism can have a corrupting effect on person, drawing a clear parallel between the resort guests’ greed and the bananafish’s insatiable appetites. According to Seymour, the bananafish seem at first like normal fish, but then they swim into holes that are full of bananas. The resort is like the holes full of bananas—just as the holes separate the fish from the rest of the ocean, the resort is cloistered from the outside world, and it's full of bananas in the sense that it's brimming with luxury and wealth. When the fish enter the holes, they become totally beholden to their gluttony; they eat so many bananas that they can no longer physically leave the hole, and they eventually die. This implies that once someone tastes luxury, they transform into beings propelled by greed. This makes them unable to leave the world of wealth and exist in normal society, which kills them. The bananafish die of "banana fever." Seymour doesn't clarify what that is, but a fever is often a reference to a psychological state—just as a fever addles the brain, when someone talks about "fevered" behavior, they usually mean fanatic and delusional. So Seymour seems to be saying that banana fever is akin to the psychological fever of materialism, which is what kills wealthy people. It's not that they overeat and their stomachs explode, or that they exhaust their supply of bananas and starve—the bananas make them psychologically addled, and that is what kills them.

Just as Seymour’s bananafish story predicts, other characters in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” seem spiritually corrupted by their materialism. Muriel, for instance, seemingly only cares about wealth. While Seymour has a poetic sensibility (he references T.S. Eliot and once mailed Muriel a book of German poems that he loves), Muriel is completely indifferent to anything that isn’t superficial. This is reflected in Seymour’s nickname for her, “Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948,” which implies that even though Muriel has plenty of money, she is—spiritually speaking—a vagrant or a beggar. Indeed, while Muriel has plenty of indications that her husband is in grave distress, she’s so blinded by materialism that she doesn’t recognize what’s going on. For instance, the psychiatrist at the resort seems to be trying to alert her to the danger Seymour is in, but when Muriel describes the interaction to her mother, she can’t remember anything the psychiatrist said—all she remembers is that his wife was wearing an ugly, unfashionable dress. With this, Salinger explicitly associates wealthy people’s concern with materialism with their inability to empathize, show kindness (rather than judgement), or have any spiritual sensibility.

Beyond being spiritually and emotionally destructive, materialism can literally kill. In Seymour’s story about the bananafish, the fish gluttonously consume so many bananas that they swell up and trap themselves in underwater holes, where they eventually die. The indication here is that greed kills—and the title of the story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” makes clear that Salinger is implicating the whole resort, meaning that it’s a perfect day for all the greedy people luxuriating. Greed also kills Seymour literally. His sensibility is opposed to the materialism that surrounds him (he loves poetry, he's playful and imaginative, he doesn't care about luxury or wealth), and he feels that he cannot keep living in a world so shallow—it's spiritual death or literal death, and he chooses literal death by shooting himself in the head. Of course, the story doesn’t explicitly reveal that Seymour’s suicide is a reaction against the consumerism surrounding him, but there are a few key moments that make this connection clear. Most notably, right before he kills himself, Seymour is acutely aware of the scent of new calf-skin luggage that Muriel just bought—a symbol of her wealth and also an encapsulation of how consumerism is tied to violence, as the luggage is made from the flesh of a baby animal that was killed so that Muriel could have a status symbol. Furthermore, Seymour looks at his sleeping wife both right before he retrieves his gun and right before he shoots himself. Throughout the story, Muriel is emblematic of their greedy, consumeristic culture: shallow, materialistic, and self-absorbed. She’s unable to empathize with others and would rather gossip than hold a meaningful conversation. So when Seymour looks at his wife—especially with the smell of calfskin luggage and nail polish in the air—it’s likely that he sees her as this symbol of materialism, which is what leads him to pull the trigger and end his own life. Materialism, the story shows, is deeply rooted in American culture—and it’s deeply destructive to the human psyche.

For a brief moment in the final lines of the story, it’s unclear if Seymour is going to kill himself or kill his wife. He frequently glances at his sleeping wife as he retrieves and loads his gun, leading readers to wonder if she will be on the receiving end of his bullet. And while the story never makes it clear whether Seymour indeed contemplates killing his wife, his ultimate decision to kill himself rather than kill her seems to suggest that the materialism she represents is too far-reaching and too embedded in American culture for it to make any difference whether she lives or dies. So, instead, Seymour decides that the only way to escape from this lifestyle is to permanently remove himself altogether. Consumerism, the story bleakly implies, isn’t going anywhere.