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Sentences We Love

  • December 09, 2008

  • Bananafish

    Posted: December 9th, 2008, 11:08am PST
    Tags:    [edit]
    "She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped strictly nothing."

    With that sentence J.D. Salinger paints the picture of Muriel as shallow in his short story A Perfect Day for Bananafish. Salinger reinforces that impression by referring to her as a "girl." If he'd simply written that Muriel didn't pick up the phone, the sentence would have lacked impact. Instead, the words march steadily downhill to "nothing."

    Muriel and husband Seymour Glass spend a day at the beach. Interestingly, the story is told mostly through dialog. Seymour is not coping with postwar life and ends his own in the story. It's one to re-read to find the sad undercurrent which causes Seymour to commit suicide.

    Salinger's story was originally published in 1948 in The New Yorker.
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