When I Grow Up: Salinger and "Growing Back Down"

In class on Monday, someone brought up how the relationship between Seymour and Sybil made them kinda uncomfortable. I was really shocked to hear that. And maybe that was just me, but the relationship between Seymour and Sybil didn’t strike me any certain way: if I had to say how I took it, I’d say it struck me as very normal. This relationship (as we talked about in class) is exceedingly similar to the one between Holden and Phoebe Caulfield in Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Holden and Phoebe are siblings, while Seymour and Sybil are clearly not, but Seymour seems boy-like in a similar way to sixteen year-old Holden. I wouldn’t for a second say that this adult-child relationship, built on the adult’s dissatisfaction with being a grown-up, is particular to just these two stories. I think it’s actually one of Salinger’s favorite relationships to portray. 

We’ve only read four of Salinger’s nine short stories, but in each one we have at least one younger person (usually a child, but sometimes an adolescent) interacting with an adult of at least their early-mid twenties (we don’t know Seymour’s age for sure, but we can assume that since he was in the war for more than a couple years, that he’s at least twenty). This relationship is slightly different in each story. In “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, as I’ve already said, we have a familiar older brother-little sister relationship to Catcher in the Rye (for everyone who’s read that book; if you haven’t, I highly recommend it if you like Salinger’s short stories). In “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut”, we have an odd, somewhat tense/jealous relationship between a mother and daughter. However it is clear that part of what Eloise envies so much about Ramona is that she is still a child, as Eloise wants desperately to go back to her own adolescence. In “Just Before the War with the Eskimos”, we get a relationship that is much closer in age than we’ve seen before, which makes us think more about if there’s any attraction to Franklin on Ginnie’s part (for the record, I think it’s more of a fascination). Franklin, like Seymour and Holden, seems disinterested in participating in normal adult life. He’s held a job in the past, but not for “normal” reasons, and now is a bit of a slob, which starkly contrasts what Ginnie seems to expect from adults who live in fancy apartments. Lastly, we have the relationship between all the boys and the Chief, and the relationship between the younger and older selves of the narrator in “The Laughing Man”. As discussed in class, the narrator seems to view his younger self with some nostalgia, reinforcing the trope of childhood as a better time in Salinger’s stories. And although the Chief isn’t the narrator, we can see this trope reinforced again through his character (there are plenty of ways to make money besides taking care of twenty-five boys six days a week). 

So what’s the point? A lot of things I think. Like I said, all of these stories sew this thread of childhood as the better part of life throughout the collection (and I believe we’ll continue to see this). They also bring out some other important (and connected) themes: the loss of innocence, the stupidity of worldly possessions. But I think that Salinger sees this adult-child relationship as a “base” unit. From this unit, we get the clashing of innocence and experience (even if the adult is disillusioned with the world and wishes to revert to childhood). And, like I said, I believe (and hope) we see this relationship to continue to be explored.