The Art of Literary Thieving: The Catcher in the Rye, Moby-Dick, ...

Having set up our expectations of what is about to occur, Salinger then surprises us with the last few words of his story. Seymour “fired a bullet through his right temple” (18).

Since the appearance of the story in The New Yorker and its reprinting in the book Nine Stories, readers have struggled to explain this ending. Seymour was the brightest, most spiritual, most enlightened member of the Glass family. Why, then, did he kill himself? Was he depressed by his discovery of just how shallow-minded his wife really was? But Seymour was clearly aware of his wife's nature before he married her, and, in a later story, he reveals his feelings for her. “How I love and need her undiscriminating heart.” Was he finally worn down by existing within a world full of phony adults? But we learn in Zooey that all of the phony adults of the world are, in Seymour's view, represented by the Fat Lady and that the Fat Lady is really “Christ Himself” and should always be accepted and treated accordingly (J. D. Salinger 1961, 200). Perhaps Seymour was dejected by the deplorable lack of innocence or spirituality in his world, fleetingly existing within the lives of small children before they grow to adulthood, as we see in the first cherubic description of Sybil on the beach. “Mrs. Carpenter was putting sun-tan oil on Sybil's shoulders, spreading it down over the delicate, wing-like blades of her back.” But when Sybil later claims to have seen a bananafish and Seymour kisses the arch of her foot, he is obviously delighted to recognize once again that childhood as a