This leads me to believe that it is the first gesture of this kind he has made towards her. She was jealous of some other wee one sitting on the piano bench with him, but, seemed disturbed (as she should be) when he kissed her foot. The little girl seemed to have previously spent a lot of time visiting with Mr. Glass by the narrator as 'girl' yet her husband as 'young man' or 'man' caught my attention. The wife might be in denial for several reasons, and I do think she was in denial waiting the long years of the war, he was her husband, and she was absorbed in things, she didn't make any effort to answer a phone call she had to wait hours to be put through, until she had her things where she wanted them. I agree he was a traumatized soldier, not an uncommon thing, I would imagine however the mother and father were greatly concerned, so I think that his mental state being impaired is a foregone conclusion. The "funny business with the trees" which most likely is how the car became damaged that "they want four hundred dollars, just to -” My initial read is that they think him dangerous to others (and possibly their property), I don't think suicide came to mind. There are many holes that the reader is left to fill in. Notice the dichotomies: reality/fantasy, adulthood/childhood, calm natured/hyper natured, pre-puberty innocence/post puberty sexuality, material world/mental world, serious/play, sanity/insanity, life/death. The second dialogue is of childhood and of fantasy. The first dialogue is as I see it a dialogue of adulthood and of reality. There is on the one hand the fabulous extended dialogue between Muriel and her mother in the first half of the story and there is the fabulous extended dialogue between Seymore and Sybil in the second hand. What is especially well crafted in this story are the dichotomies. I think Seymore is just a child in an adult body. ![]() But there is no attempt at anything other than play, and we do not get any suggestion of sexual deviance. Now I could be wrong there, since Seymore is obviously an adult and Sybil is roughly three I think. There is an innocence there, and that play between him and Sybil I think should be read as play between pre-puberty (pre-sexual) children. Seymore cannot seem to live in the adult world. I read Seymore as a person who has regressed to a child-like mentality, probably as a result of the trauma he suffered in the war. I think in the end the intention might have been to make the reader think the woman is in danger - as her mother warned her about the guy.Īre you reacting to the possibility of pedophilia? It does come close, but I cannot find any themes in here about pedophilia. Maybe it was the kissing of the feet which caught me of guard. I really enjoyed the talk with the little girl, though there was a slight feeling of "uneasy" through it all which I can not quite place. He has gotten banana fever, he has lost his mind. ![]() Maybe it is he himself, who has been looking for a hole/home and now he has found it, he can not live with it - he has eaten too much. I do expect it to be there, but I do not see what it can be, at all. I am not sure about the bananafish as a metaphor. But then again, that might be the innocence you're talking about. He could have made up a wonderful story about his feet, I'm sure. Maybe it is rather that he feels he can not be himself around them - they don't play along with his stories, like the bananafish. ![]() I am not sure about him treating adults on the whole badly. The tattoo being an illusion and him having some form of PTSD makes more sense though, I think. When they mentioned the tattoo, I actually thought he might have been in a concentration camp. So he seems to have been away during the war, probably in active duty - though it is never mentioned that he actually was a soldier. "When I think of how you waited for that boy all through the war-I mean when you think of all those crazy little wives who-"
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