Summative Responses

We Are Bananafish

Author's note: This is a short response to A Perfect Day for Bananafish, focusing on the idea that you can't redo anything in life. Being my first piece of the year, I struggled with this piece in the beginning because I had difficulty grasping a single thesis to begin with, but after a talk with Mr. Johnson, I got focused on a single idea. My main goal in this piece is that it is clear and does not stray from the thesis.

We can't undo anything, stuck with our past behind us, some people think. It's our story, the path that we chose to follow and continues to guide us. However, if we truly examine the metaphor, we don't actually have a story. Rather, we are the story. Every decision we make builds up to who we are and will be.

The decisions we make everyday build who we are. We can’t always help the circumstances, but it is often little choices we’ve made that put us where we are now. For our first breath of life, things were perfect. As soon as things start going wrong, though, we can never return there, no matter how hard we try. In Genesis, God created a perfect world with perfect life. He created humans. We were made in His image, but we can never be as perfect as Him, which is why soon after humankind was created, things for us started going wrong. One little decision; to eat the fruit. It’s the one little decision that determined our fate. We humans would be sinful creatures because that one little decision is and always will be a part of us, and what made us. Though we may wish, it can’t be undone.

This is what Seymore seems to realize at the end of the story: that there’s no going back. What he said about the bananafish is true. Everything about them is truth for us people. We are very normal on the outside, but in everyone, there is a pig -- a sinful, greedy pig. We intake sin as if it were food, and along with the sin comes guilt. As humans, we can only take so much. When Seymore tells Sybil about the bananafish eventually consuming so many bananas, they can’t get out of the hole they are in, she wonders what happens to them. Seymore truthfully tells her they go mad from banana fever and simply die.

Not all humans are so overwhelmed with grief that they take their own life, but many facing warfare or who make continuous bad decisions  do sink into depression’s hole. Once we are too far in, there is really no way out. What we must do is choose through life carefully. We all miss the innocence, but there is no going back on Earth, so we need to stop regretting our decisions because there’s no changing them. The only time we’ve got is this moment we are in, nothing else.