Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” made me realize a brand new perspective on how society deals with mental illness. I was very uncomfortable reading Seymour Glass’s interactions with the young girls, as was a lot of other people who agreed with me in the Discussions forum. I was ready to dismiss Seymour as a pedophile. When the focus of the short story suddenly switched to him without warning, I had the warnings from Muriel’s mother at the forefront of my mind so I viewed Seymour as someone unstable and dangerous, a ticking timebomb. The first time I reached the end of the story, I felt almost blindsided by his suicide.

My discomfort with Seymour’s actions was reasonable, in my opinion, because I have certain morals about how adults should act around children, but in the end my view of Seymour was still superficial at its best. I didn’t make the effort to understand him, and neither did Muriel or her mother in the story. Society tends to avoid the topic of mental health because it makes people uncomfortable and because it goes against their idea of what is normal or what is moral. Or maybe it is simply because many people are still ignorant about the different manifestations of bad mental health. Every case is unique, in a way.

People have to be actively openminded in order to help out people suffering from mental illness, and it is not an easy task sometimes. There are human limitations to empathy and sometimes we can be ignorant or quick to judge without meaning to.

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