A Perfect Day for Bananafish | Analysis

This study guide will help you analyze the text “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by J.D. Salinger. We will show you examples of elements in the text that will be relevant for your own analysis. In these notes, we will focus on summary, structure, characters, setting, narrator and point of view, language, themes and help you put the text into perspective.

Presentation of the text

Title: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”
Author: J. D. Salinger
Published in: The New Yorker
Date of Publication: 1948
Genre: Short Story

Jerome David Salinger (1919-2010), known to the public as J.D. Salinger, was an American author of short stories and novels. The writer became popular early in his career, but chose to live a very private life. Although he lived a long life, his last original fiction work was published in 1965. Today he is best-known and appreciated for the novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and the short story collection Nine Stories (1953).

Excerpt

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Title

The title "A Perfect Day for Bananfish" is intriguing because the “bananafish” is not a real species of fish, but something fictional. Upon reading the story, the meaning of the title becomes clearer, as it is an allusion to a line spoken by one of the main characters, Seymour Glass: “You just keep your eyes open for any bananafish. This is a perfect day for bananafish.” The bananafish are, of course, symbolic in the story. They could be seen as representing materialism in adult society. In Seymour’s story about bananafish, the fish eat too many bananas, get banana fever, and die.