An Interfamilial Relationship

Right off the bat in the story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," in Salinger's Nine Stories, we are introduced to Muriel, a daughter on vacation with her war-veteran husband Seymour. Not long thereafter we are introduced through the phone to Muriel's mother, who wastes no time in interrogating Muriel about whether she is safe or not and bringing up Seymour and his mental instability. Her mother clearly does not trust Seymour, as she constantly feels insecure about his peculiarities and behaviors in context of his mental state. The entire dynamic of the conversation itself shows the difference in interests between the two parties. At first, Muriel is not nearly as invested in the conversation as her mother is, and only later begins to speak more substantially in order to calm her mother down. Muriel's mother, on the other hand, evidently cares about Muriel's safety, but her constant interruptions and excessive questioning of Muriel give us the sense that she is just an overprotective mother and Muriel is the young, calmer kid in this relationship. Interestingly, after reading the last lines, we learn that it is the extensively overprotective mother who was closer to the truth after all.

On the first page of the story, we already get a sense of Muriel's disinterested nature with respect to the phone call: "She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her phone had been ringing continually ever since she had reached puberty" (3). Although Muriel is the one who originally dialed in the call to her mother, even after the long two and a half hour wait she is less that eager to pick up the phone. She specifically knows that it is her mother on the other end of the line, but immediately appears aloof and uninterested, as she takes her sweet time to pick up the phone, waiting until "it was the fifth or sixth ring" (4) to pick it up. This, in stark contrast to Muriel's mother's fast-paced bombardment of questions, lead us to see Muriel as the cool, confident daughter who is constantly fending off her overprotective mother's far fetched worries in this classic mother-daughter relationship. A mere seconds after confirming that it is indeed Muriel on the other side of the line, the mother cuts off Muriel's explanation of why she took so long to call to simply ask "Are you all right, Muriel" (4). This abrupt interruption on the part of Muriel's mother, not even taking into account what Muriel was saying, insinuate towards Muriel's true worry in the conversation: Seymour. Her constant repetition of the question "Are you all right?" as well as her manner of rapidly asking things such as "when did you get there?" and "who drove" (5) portray her as a stereotypical, overprotective mother. While Muriel does interrupt her mother herself at times, it is mainly to calm her mother down. Her responses are reasonable and coherent, and it is because of this that the mother's constant fretting about Seymour appears unwarranted and futile; it seems that Muriel  is safe has everything under control, as she constantly seeks to reassure her mother that everything is in order every time her mother interrupts with worry.

In addition to the dynamic of the conversation itself, it is important to note that the setting of this scene of the story itself takes place in the hotel at which Muriel and Seymour are staying, and not, conversely, at Muriel's' mother's home. Because we see this phone conversation through the eyes of Muriel, we can observe the little subtleties in the way she talks to her mother that sway us, as readers, towards her side of the argument. The first instance of one of these subtleties is the moment when Muriel "turned the receiver slightly away from her ear" (4) after having exchanged a mere two sentences with her mother. This implies that the mother is borderline shouting her overzealous worries into the phone, to the point where Muriel has to literally increase the distance between the receiver and her ear in order to prevent damage to her eardrum. The fact that she has to repeat this action and "increase[] the angle between the receiver and her ear" (4), accentuates this notion. In conjunction with this action of moving the receiver away from her ear, Muriel's actions of smoking in this scene speak to her attitude towards the conversation. Interrupting her mother, Salinger narrates after Muriel speaks: "Just a second, mother," the girl said. She went over to the window seat for her cigarettes, lit one, and returned to the seat on her bed. "Mother?" she said, exhaling smoke" (6). We can observe from this scene how Muriel feels about her mother's claims and the conversation as a whole. She interrupts her mother's recounting of last nights events just to go outside and light a cigarette. It's almost as if Muriel knows that she is in for a long, tiresome conversation, and decides to smoke a cigarette to try and alleviate some of this frustration that results from fending off her mother's worries. The exhaling of smoke act as a sort of a mental preparation to continue the conversation with her mother. The whole procedure of interrupting her mother to light and smoke a cigarette implies that Muriel is confident in herself, and truly believes that everything is fine and that her mother shouldn't worry. She supposedly knows what the situation is better than her mother, and it is now just a matter of convincing her mother that there is no need to worry, taking a quick smoke to relieve herself and prepare her for the rest of the conversation. Ironically, as we are built up to lean towards Muriel, and this notion holds up for all but the last page of the story, it in this last page, when Seymour kills himself for no apparent reason, that forces us to look back and realize that maybe Muriel's mother's worrying wasn't so unwarranted after all.