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| Plot Summary of A Perfect Day for Bananafish |
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"A Perfect Day for Bananafish is about a young girl and a boy who both run away together to a beach resort in New York. Muriel (the girl) is perfectly sane and acts like any other normal girl would; very interested in self-looks and lives a carefree life.
However, Sybil (the boy) is mentally ill and depressed.
Sybil is on the beach and is flirting with a girl, seeming like a normal person. But he begins to scare the girl by saying the most random, most wierd things such as what a bananafish is. She runs away from him and depresses Sybil even more. On his way back to the hotel room, he thinks that a woman is staring at his extremely pale feet when she was actually staring at the floor. He yells at her and she denies staring at his feet, which causes him to yell at her even more and calls her a sneak. Then, Sybil goes into his hotel room and shoots himself."
alisa, Resident Scholar
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"In the book, 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish', Seymour Glass has returned from World War II a little delusional, depressed, and maybe a little bit crazy. Muriel, his wife, is more interested in herself than her husband, and keeps to her own in her hotel room while they are on vacation. Muriel's family is concerned about Seymour and their daughter, as he has been calling her odd names and behaving badly in public.
The story shifts to where Seymour is laying on the beach alone, and is very pale and covered up. A little girl named Sybil comes up to him and begins talking, they seem to already know each other. Sybil is concerned with whether or not Seymour likes another little girl better than her since she had been sitting with him in the hotel lobby on the piano bench while he played. Seymour reassures her and tells her a story of the bananafish and that they should go into the water to look for them. She is floating on a raft and claims that she spots one, Seymour describes how bananafish can eat seventy bananas in the hole they swim into, but they die because they become too fat to fit back through the hole afterwards.
Seymour returns to the hotel and feels as if a woman is staring at his feet, she says she is not, but it puts him on edge because he feels as if his feet are normal and not worth staring at. He enters his hotel room where Muriel, his wife, is sleeping on a twin bed by herself, and he pulls out a gun and shoots himself in the head. "
bzook, Resident Scholar
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| Review Analysis of A Perfect Day for Bananafish |
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Our unique search engine provides a wealth of detail about books by breaking them down into many different literary elements, all of which are searchable (click here).
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Ratings are on a 1-10 scale (Low to High)
Plot
Tone of book?
- depressed
Time/era of story
- 1930's-1950's
Kids growing up/acting up?
Yes
Internal struggle/realization?
Yes
Is this an adult or child's book?
- Adult or Young Adult Book
Battle with a psychiatrist
Yes
Something wrong upstairs/downstairs?
- mental illness
Brain/Body disability?
- mental illness
Main Character
Gender
- Male
Profession/status:
- student
- infantry soldier
Age:
- 20's-30's
Eccentric/Mental
Yes
Eccentric:
- mentally ill
- deluded
- emotionally unstable
- wild
Is this an ordinary person caught up in events?
Yes
Ethnicity/Nationality
- White (American)
How sensitive is this character?
- middling sensitive to others' feelings
Sense of humor
- Mostly serious with occasional humor
Intelligence
- Average intelligence
Physique
- average physique
- healthy but a geeky weakling
Main Adversary
Identity:
- none
Setting
How much descriptions of surroundings?
- 5 ()
United States
Yes
The US:
- Southeast
- Northeast
- Deep South
Misc setting
- resort/hotel
Style
Person
- mostly 3rd
Accounts of torture and death?
- generic/vague references to death/punishment
- moderately detailed references to deaths
Unusual Style:
- a lot of stream of consciousness
- No single main character?
Amount of dialog
- significantly more dialog than descript
- significantly more descript than dialog
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Note: the views expressed here are only those of the reviewer(s). | |
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