Connections Between the Stories

1.     The first connection I make through the three stories is the idea of wealth. In A Perfect day for Bananafish, we see wealth in the character of Muriel and her family. Muriel is wearing a Saks blouse, her parents offer for her to go on a cruise and she is very judgmental of the women she met in the green dress that her and her mother had seen before. In Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut, JD Salinger sets the setting to be in a Connecticut suburb where Eloise and her friend Mary Jane are just hanging out in the middle of the day, not working or anything and has a maid. In Just before the War with the Eskimos, it isn’t as direct to the point of their wealth but there is two teenage girls, Selena and Ginny who have tennis lessons, live in New York city and take a cab around not the subway. Through these three stories wealth is being shown, however, I think Salinger is using this as a symbol to represent that fact that even with a lot of money, you still encounter difficulty and despair. In Bananafish, Muriel’s husband kills himself, in Uncle Wiggly Eloise is so miserable with her current life and she has not gotten over the death of her true love and in War with the Eskimos, it is shown that Selena’s family is going through a hard time with her mother being sick and Franklin and his problems.

2.     Another connections in these three stories is Salinger’s writing style. In all the three stories there is no backup information given to you. In each of the stories leaves the reader wondering what is going on. Each of the stories are tightly packed together, the setting is usually taken place in one setting. In Banana fish it is in the hotel, in Uncle Wiggly the setting is the house and in Eskimos the setting is the apartment. And Salinger makes the story on take place over a few hours.  

3.     Salinger uses a focused event in the story as the point when the characters change. For Seymour Glass, he was a disconnected, isolated and unengaged in the adults around him. Upon entering the elevator in the hotel, he thinks the lady is staring at his feet, yells at her and goes and kills himself. This act is drastically and completely opposite of his character before, where he was calm and realized with Syble. In Uncle Wiggly, Eloise goes up to her daughter’s room after an afternoon of drinking, judgment of other and making remarks that make the readers believe she is unhappy in her life. She is in Ramona’s room and picks up her daughters glasses and looks through them. It is in the act of looking through the glasses that she transforms into a character that is looking inward and trying to directly understand her life. We know this by when she goes back down stairs and asks “I was a nice girl…wasn’t I?” which is a very inward reflection of herself, which she had not done previously in the story. In The War with the Eskimos, Ginny in the beginning is a character who is persistently self centered and trying to get what she wants, which is the cab money from Selena regardless of what is going on in Selena’s life. Even when Selena describes her mother ill, it is as if Ginny doesn’t even hear that part and is still focused on the fact that she wants the money. However, once Ginny accepts the sandwich hesitantly from Franklin and she bites it and now as a character she able to allow herself to accept to Franklin and Selena for who they are and she wants to become friends with them, which is a total change from the beginning of the story.