David F. answered • 05/05/22
College Student, Professional Editor, and Educator
The bananafish is Seymour Glass's metaphor for traumatized participants in World War II. Muriel Glass's conversation with her mother alludes to Seymour's 'shell-shock,' which validates this context for his bananafish metaphor.
Seymour experienced trauma in Germany which obstructs his social reintegration into the story's setting (a post-war American society). He explains his struggle through the bananafish metaphor:
"Well, they [bananafish] swim into a hole where there's a lot
of bananas. They're very ordinary-looking fish
when they swim in. But once they get in, they
behave like pigs. Why, I've known some
bananafish to swim into a banana hole and
eat as many as seventy-eight bananas... after that they're so
fat they can't get out of the hole again. Can't
fit through the door" (Salinger).
The hole which the fish enter in this metaphor is the war setting. In Seymour's situation, it is World War II. The pig-like behavior they adopt is not explicit in the text. In the context of the feast; however, it is reasonable to infer that the fish adopt a pig's ravenous hunger. Furthermore, the appearance of bananas in the ocean is unnatural, much less the fish' tendency to consume them. Seymour's decision to use bananas for the metaphor is likely commentary on both the inhuman nature of war and man's tendency to excel at it. Some bananafish eat plethora of bananas like many apparently nonbelligerent people enter war only to prove extraordinarily lethal.
The bananafish' inability to escape the hole is indicative of Seymour (and by extension other veterans') difficulty reintegrating into the civilian lifestyle they came from -– the ocean outside the hole. But their death by 'bananafever' suggests that Seymour's deepest wounds from the war are are cerebral rather than superficial. Seymour is the bananafish suffering more from the invisible bananafever rather than the apparent obesity that characterizes bananafish. While the obesity is likely a metaphor for the physical injuries and war wounds people expect soldiers to carry, Seymour's fever is the trauma which drives him toward suicide at the end of the story.
