Books: SONNY

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The evolution of Seymour into this being of almost supersensory perception is one of the more fascinating parts of J. D. Salinger's history. Seymour first appeared in the limpid, shattering, 1948 short story, A Perfect Day for Bananafish, in which he goes swimming with a little girl on a Florida beach and, overcome by her innocence, swallows too much sublimity (or, one guesses later, too much despair). He returns to his hotel room, where his wife has been gabbling on the phone to her mother, and shoots himself through the head. Reasons for the cryptic suicide were suggested in a superb story written seven years later, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, in which Seymour's wedding day is recalled; it shows a sensitive, gentle, somewhat weak man about to tie himself to a mass of hair nets, deodorant bottles and parroted psychiatric untruths.