Short Story Essay 3

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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,
Page 1: Jessica KarKar 11/2/11 AP Literatur

Short Story Essay 3

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