Abstract
A perfect day for a banana fish is a short story written by JD Salinger in 1948, it deals with one day in the life of Seymour and his wife Muriel who are staying at a hotel in Florida near the beach. Through the story, we understand that Seymour is a veteran and has lost his mind after coming back from the war. Seymour's madness worries Muriel's mother who asks her daughter to come back home. While Muriel is talking to her mother on the phone, Seymour is staying on the beach with a little girl named Sybil and tells her a story about bananafish. They happen to be ordinary fishes, but when they swim into a hole full of bananas they behave like pigs and eat so many bananas that they can't go out of the hole again. At the end of the story, Seymour finally goes back to his room and kills himself.
The end of the story is quite surprising and leaves the reader with many questions; indeed until the very end we don't expect Seymour's suicide and we keep wondering "why did he kill himself?" . To answer this question, the reader has to go through the story again looking for some hints which could explain his death, and there are actually many of them but they highlight the fact that there are many interpretations possible to explain the motives of his suicide.
