Comparing A Perfect Day For Bananafish And For Esme With Love
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“You can't patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid” (Michael Connelly). This means that no matter how much you try and repair a damaged soul, you can’t heal it once a piece of it has been taken away. J D Salinger wrote the two unique and complex short stories called A Perfect Day for Bananafish and For Esme With Love and Squalor. In both of these short stories, the main characters Sergeant X and Seymour are soldiers who have served in World War II and they have both been traumatized in the war physically and physiologically. The two solders gave up their psychological well-being in the war and as a result they are no longer the person they once were and feel like they are living in an alienated like society from which they can’t escape. The people…show more content… Muriel neglect’s her husband Seymour because she makes no effort to try and understand what he is going through. Muriel needs to accept Seymour despite his imperfections and show that she cares for his well-being by translating the German poems that Seymour had given her as a way of reaching out to her. Muriel didn’t make any effort in reading the German poems and this signifies that Muriel doesn’t want to understand the post-traumatic stress that Seymour is going through after the war and she fails to reach out and empathise leaving him with the only option of suicide. Similarly, Sergeant X family neglect’s him since they don’t care about his well-being. They never ask him how he is doing and Esme is the only person that shows him love and that she cares for him. When Sergeant X receives letters from his wife, in the letter she tells him how the service at a restaurant has fallen off. This illustrates that his wife doesn’t provide Seymour with any loving support or show any empathy for him since she doesn’t ask him how he is and if everything is alright. Instead, she focuses on telling him irrelevant information from her life showing that she is selfish since she only cares for what’s going in her life. Furthermore, both soldiers lack support from the people around them. Seymour was not provided with sufficient support from his nurses and doctors from the hospital. They released him from the hospital too early since he wasn’t prepared to leave when they let him return home. When Muriel talks with her mother on the phone, her mother acknowledged “It was a perfect crime the army released him from the hospital” (Salinger 6). This quote demonstrates that the doctors and nurses shouldn’t have let Seymour leave the hospital so early and that they abandoned and gave up on him since they