Short Story Essay 3

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,