Nine Stories

Title: Nine Stories

Author: J. D. Salinger

Genre: Short Stories

Time: 5.2 hours

2015 Book Challenge: a book of short stories

Choosing this book was very arbitrary.  I googled top 10 books of short stories and choose one hoping it was an easy read coz I wanna finish this book challenge by November.  I had no idea what this was all about.

 

At first it was a bit odd because the stories would suddenly end with some sort of cliff hanger.  It took a while to get used to the fact that these were short stories and not a novel.  Therefore, it felt like there were so many details missing and many questions unanswered that I am constantly half tempted to google this.  But I held off coz I wanna share my pure, uninfluenced reactions.

 

The stories would start innocuously enough but the last 2 paragraphs would abruptly end leaving you wondering if you missed something.  It feels like each story has some sort of metaphorical/allegorical/deep meaning/allusions that I was too dumb to get.  I always hated those types of homework in college.  Why can’t things just mean what they say?? Why does it have to be all so complicated??

 

Anyways, imma gonna try to take a stab at deciphering these stories:

 

A Perfect Day for Bananafish: soldier suffering PTSD from the war that’s why he killed himself beside his sleeping girlfriend (or was it fiancé)?

 

Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut: an unhappy, lonely housewife trying to deal with a cheating husband?

 

Just Before the War with the Eskimos: a girl with some sort of hoarding tendencies? Or OCD-like disorder

 

The Laughing Man: a camp councilor type-guy killing off the kids’ “hero” character because he had a bad break up.  Is this a metaphor for “death of innocence”? hahaha, lookit me, tryin’ to be deep and stuff.

 

Down at the Dinghy: If hadn’t googled what a kike was (which is a Jewish Person), I would probably have no idea what this was all about.  I was stumped at first because the references were dated.  Because I read A Hundred Summers, I understand how big of a deal being Jewish was at this time and perhaps this was the reason the little boy kept running away from home because people were mean to him or said mean things about his Jewish dad.  I thought it was more sinister like his dad molesting him or something.

 

For Esme: -- with Love and Squalor: I think this is PTSD again.  A soldier’s unlikely friendship with a girl “saves” from PTSD when she loaned him her dead father’s watch making it very significant to him because he knew it was very important to her.

 

Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes: I’m stumped with this one. It’s a young guy calling an older colleague venting about his cheating wife, meanwhile the old guy is in his room with another woman.  I thought for sure the twist was the old guy was cheating with the young man’s wife.  But it wasn’t.  It did imply that the old man had some sort of motor skills problem.  But I had no idea what the relevance of this was to the whole story.  Were the old man and the young man one and the same?? Or am I reading too much into this?

 

De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period: about a snobby (that’s just me), young “artist’s” short stint as an art teacher during the summer.  He sorta fell in love with his student’s work but the student, for some reason, decided not to pursue art school leading to him get all depressed and telling his other students that they suck and they should just stop trying to be better artists.  But then something happened at a tailor shop (or was it curtain shop?) that lead to some epiphany (which I had no idea what, but I somehow sense this is significant).  He then wrote again to his students telling them that there was some sort of mix up and they should continue art school.

 

Teddy: is about a 10-year old boy who is an expert on existential philosophy.  If I hadn’t had tons of philosophy classes in college, I would have gone loopy reading this.  It hinted that he can somehow predict people’s death.  It ends abruptly with a girl shouting.  Did Teddy know he was gonna die?  Did the man who was talking to him know as well and was he trying to prevent it from happening?  Or am I just jumping to conclusions?

 

Okay, so I’ve had enough… Maybe I’m just reading too much between the lines, haha.  I’m gonna google this and see if I’m anywhere near correct in guessing.