"Just Before the War With the Eskimos" Connections

1. JBWWE definitely connects to the other stories in the use of cigarettes. It's seems to be a motif that points to self-destructive tendencies because smoking so much is essentially destroying your body. In APDBF, Muriel is the one who's smoking and the description "congested ashtray" suggests she smokes a lot. Both Mary Jane and Eloise are smoking in UWC. The way Mary Jane is still reaching for her cigarettes after a while of drinking shows she must do it a lot as well. Franklin and the oddly unnamed young man smoke in JBWWE and both of them seem like somewhat off characters, what with Franklin making Ginny take the sandwich and all.

2. All three of the stories seem to have a seemingly random object connected with destructive or weird things about a character that only get revealed at the end of the book. The bananafish, while introduced earlier in the story, don't show up as particularly weird until Seymour, the man who brought them up, shoots himself. Eloise looks to be a fairly normal character until the end of the story, when she's crying so much. She talks about a brown and yellow dress and connects it with memories of her being happy and a different person than she is now. At the end of JBWWE, Ginny doesn't have anything odd standing out about her until a dead chick is mentioned, which should have been thrown out right away but took her several days.

3. The revealing character interactions in the stories mainly happen between an older character and a younger character. Seymour's characterization as an oddball who focuses on purity in children doesn't show up until he's talking to Sybil, a girl much much younger than him. While the majority of the dialogue in UWC is between Eloise and Mary Jane, the character development where Eloise is crying comes out while she's talking with/to Ramona. Ginny doesn't open herself up with Franklin and certainly not with Selena but when she meets the young man in his thirties (possibly names Eric), she becomes more comfortable with him and talks with him about more things than she did with Franklin.