Short Story Essay 3

Jessica KarKar
11/2/11
AP Literature, Period 3
Short Story Literary Analysis
In the short stories A Perfect Day for Bananafish, by JD Salinger, The Unclouded
Day, by E. Annie Proulx, and The Fix, by Percival Everett, the authors make use of
allegories, parallelism, diction, metaphors, and similes in order to explore themes of
dealing with the absurdities and complexities of life, and the search for individual place
in the vast universe.
In E. Annie Proulx’s The Unclouded Day, the author employs similes and
connotative diction in order to give us a sense of Santee’s natural world versus Earl’s
material world, and to explore the theme of individual place in the universe. Proulx uses
statements such as, “Stars glinted like chips of mica in the paling sky” (Proulx, 100), and,
“dust lay like yellow flour on the roads” (Proulx, 89), to distinguish Santee’s and Earl’s
relationships with the natural world and the material world. Proulx uses these similes of
nature to show how Santee appreciates the beauty of the natural world, and how he relies
on it because it is his place in the universe. He has no need or want for the shallowness
and materialism that Earl has forced into his natural world. Proulx states, “Stars glinted
like chips of mica in the paling sky, hoarfrost coated the fields and the row of stones
along the drive. The puddles in the road were frozen solid. It was going to be a cold,
unclouded day” (Proulx, 100). Proulx’s use of diction gives off a sanguine and serene

tone. It is a fresh new day, unclouded by Earl. Her use of this connotative diction
throughout the story helps build up the plot through feeling and imagery. Proulx’s use of
these literary devises gives us an in-depth perception of the characters and the theme of
the story.
In A Perfect Day for Bananafish, JD Salinger uses allegory and diction to
formulate the theme of dealing with the absurdities and complexities of life. Salinger
states:
… The girl in 507 had to wait from noon till almost two-thirty to get her call
through. She used the time though. She read an article in a women’s pocket-size
magazine, called “Sex is fun—or Hell.” She washed her comb and brush. She
took the spot out of the skirt of her beige suit. She moved the button on her Saks
blouse. She tweezed out two freshly surfaced hairs on her mole. When the
operator finally rang her room, she was sitting on the window seat and had almost
finished putting lacquer on the nails of her left hand. She was a girl who for a
ringing phone dropped exactly nothing (Salinger, 7).
Salinger’s use of diction helps develop certain characteristics of Muriel, such as her
vanity, materialism, and superiority. Muriel’s self-absorption makes her seem indifferent
to Seymour’s situation. This infers that she doesn’t truly understand Seymour’s tragic
experience, and this occurrence makes Seymour feel like an outsider in her shallow
world. Seymour says:
Well, they swim into a hole where there’s a lot of bananas. They’re very ordinarylooking
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. Naturally after they’re so fat they can’t get out of the hole
again. Can’t fit through the door… I hate to tell you, Sybil. They die… They get
banana fever. It’s a terrible disease (Salinger, 16).
Salinger portrays Seymour’s story of the bananafish as an allegory for Seymour’s
experience in the war. The banana hole represents the war, the bananafish represent

Seymour and the other men who fought in the war, the bananas represent the people that
were killed, and the banana fever represents the loss of innocence, the trauma, and the
build up of guilt that the men suffered after returning home from the war. Seymour could
no longer live with his “banana fever,” and eventually deals with the absurdities and
complexities he faces by dieing, just as the fate of all bananafish. Salinger’s use of
diction and allegory gives us a deeper understanding of the characters, and a broader
insight to the theme of the story.
In The Fix, Percival Everett utilizes parallelism in order to develop the plot, and
the theme of individual place in the vast universe; and metaphors in order to give us a
better understanding of the characters’ actions in the story. Sherman Olney says, “You
have to be careful about what you fix... If you irrigate a desert, you might empty a sea”
(Everett, 133). Everett’s use of metaphors illustrates Sherman’s purpose. By him being
the sea, the people whom he fixes things for would be the desert, so in order to “irrigate a
desert,” sacrifices must be made, and, in this case, that sacrifice was himself; this is his
place, his purpose, in the universe. The story opens with Sherman attempting to escape
two men who are in pursuit of him and his abilities: “… Sherman Olney whom Douglas
had seen beaten to near extinction one night by a couple of silky-looking men who
seemed to know Sherman and wanted something from him,” states Everett (Everett, 121);
and the story closes with Sherman attempting to escape a mob of people who are in
pursuit of him and his abilities: “The masses of people pressed in from either side…
‘Don’t!’ they all screamed. ‘Fix us! Fix us!” (Everett, 134). The author’s use of
parallelism puts an emphasis on the paradoxical behavior of human nature. The two men
in the beginning of the story and the mob at the end are perplexed by Sherman’s abilities,

yet in both situations he and his abilities become so desired that the people don’t realize
that they are destroying the very thing they cherish most. Everett’s use of parallelism and
metaphor helps us decipher the characters’ purposes in the story, and comprehend the
theme of individual place in the universe.
In these short stories, we observe how JD Salinger, E. Annie Proulx, and Percival
Everett explore themes of individual place and the search for ways to deal with life by
using similes, allegories, metaphors, diction, and parallelism. The authors succeed in
making a modern statement about human nature. Certain aspects of human nature
indicated are paradoxical behaviors, greed, and an ambiguous perspective towards life. I
would most definitely recommend these short stories to a selected few who I know would
be as interested as I am in comparing and contrasting our thoughts on the subjects. I
found the exploration of these short stories from the Modern/Post-modern Era to be
rather enjoyable and very insightful.