Comparing D. Salinger's The Cumaean Sybil And G

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The Cumaean Sybil was a prophetess in Greek mythology. Supposedly, she gained the ability to live for all eternity. However, she kept aging through her immortality. When she turned to a pile of dust and was forced to continue living, all that she wanted was death. She was young and naïve when she gained her immortality and later in her life, she became mature enough to understand her mistake and to begin her search for inner peace. Both J.D. Salinger and Richard Eberhart discuss the point of view that adulthood is filled with despair. In Salinger’s short story, despair is used to show the need for inner peace while in Eberhart’s poem, despair is used to contrast childhood and adulthood. In each, the authors prove that childhood, tranquility, …show more content…

Salinger presents the idea that Seymour Glass is struggling to continue with life when he returns home from the war so that the reader may infer that war negatively affects everyone by forcing them into despair and therefore causing the need for inner peace. To achieve this intent, Salinger utilizes a parable describing the made-up banana fish and the juxtaposition of Muriel and Sybil. In the parable, a fish swims into a banana hole and it eats all of the bananas that are there. After doing this, it becomes so fat that it can’t fit through the hole. Then it gets banana fever and it dies. This parable is a complete representation of war. Soldiers go off to battle and kill many other people. Their souls become so torn apart from the horrible acts they have done that they become so distraught that they cannot go on and like Seymour, they die. Seymour’s spirit is broken and in his search for peace, others assume that he is mentally unstable. Muriel’s mother even “[talks] about him as though he were a raving maniac” (Salinger 9). War is created by adults and it creates adults. When anyone is sent off to war, they must become serious and mature very quickly because if they don’t, they might not live to see the next day. This …show more content…

When a soldier goes to fight in war and they gain knowledge and experiences that are unhealthy for most people to have, they enter a stage of adulthood. This stage is the “realm of complexity” (Eberhart 14) that brings so much trouble to any that have entered it. Seymour going off to war is the same concept as the narrator of the poem giving the moral answer – for both, it is the end of their peaceful, innocent time period. Adults are constantly trying to get back to the time where they could do or be anything. They are also trying to re-stitch their spirits back together from growing up. Childhood is a much easier time where the brain doesn’t need to focus on reality like it does during adulthood. This is why the narrator of the poem wishes to live his life similar to the way a child can and this is why Seymour Glass can connect so well with young Sybil – childhood is the innocence that ex-soldiers search for and adults yearn for. It may even contribute to the despair that adults deal with. Salinger and Eberhart both prove in their works that the desire of each person that has reached adulthood will always be to find inner

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