“A Narrator, But One With Extremely Pressing Personal Needs”: Narrative Drive and Affective Crisis in Salinger’s “Seymour; An Introduction”

J. D. Salinger’s story “Seymour; An Introduction” (1959) purports to be an “Introduction” to the work of a man named Seymour Glass, written by his fictional brother Buddy. It is part of a series of fictional works published by Salinger over seventeen years, portraying aspects of the life of the Glass family. The first, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948), is a thirdperson narrative of a young Seymour Glass who, on vacation with his wife in Florida, is portrayed having an intimate interaction with a four-year-old girl named Sybil at the beach, and then going up to his hotel room to kill himself while his wife sleeps on the bed next to his. The five other stories—“Franny” (1955), “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (1955), “Zooey” (1957), “Seymour; An Introduction” (1959), and “Hapworth 16, 1924” (1965)—refer, more or less directly, to Seymour or his suicide. The Glass stories, as they are often called, form what Eberhard Alsen calls a “composite” novel (65), which in his reading deals to varying degrees with the influence of Seymour’s suicide on his family: his childlike vaudevilleperformer parents, his variably admiring six younger siblings, and, sometimes, his apparently mismatched wife. But a reading that places Seymour at the center of the Glass cycle is ultimately complicated by another character who, while missing in the first two stories, emerges as a narrator in the third, and in the final three not only refers to himself as the one writing