A Perfect Day for Bananafish

Seymour Glass is a complex and complicated protagonist. He is the eldest sibling in the Glass family, a group of brilliant but troubled individuals, and is often portrayed as the most sensitive and introspective member of the family throughout J. D. Salinger’s works. In the stories in which he appears, Seymour is characterized as a highly intelligent, deeply troubled, and emotionally fragile individual who struggles to find meaning and purpose in a world that he finds overwhelmingly chaotic and absurd. He was discharged from the US Army, and his experiences in World War II inform his mental instability.

One of Seymour’s defining characteristics is his acute sensitivity. This sensitivity is evident in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” the first story in which Seymour appears. Seymour is gentle and kind with Sybil and is clearly impacted by her innocence and vulnerability. However, he is also haunted by memories of the horrors he witnessed during World War II and is unable to reconcile his own experiences of suffering with Sybil’s youthful innocence. This tension between Seymour’s compassion and his trauma is a recurring conflict throughout the stories in which he appears. Salinger said that he believed Seymour “was not Seymour at all but…myself” (Salinger, J.