![]() But the Ginnie who walks out of that house is a different girl. Salinger leaves that out of the story, it’s between the lines – nothing is explicit. Ginnie starts to ask him questions about all of this, and his responses are overwhelmingly sarcastic – “I love airplanes … they’re so cute …” and yet he also offers her his sandwich, he actually insists on her taking it … Do they connect? Maybe. He also reveals that he quit college, and spent 37 months in Ohio working in an airplane factory. He divulges that he had rheumatic fever when he was a kid and there is something the matter with his heart. Is it that somehow Ginnie knows he’s right – that her sister is a snob? That there is something refreshing about his honesty, in the middle of all of that upper-class repression? Not sure. Ginnie at first is enraged – how dare he talk to her like that – but somehow, through the next couple pages, she lets that go and seems to start to find him funny. He has cut his finger, he seems to think she will know what to do, but then he ruins things by making a sneering comment about her sister, and how she is a snob. And although this is just an interpretation, here goes: Ginnie goes through some sort of obvious transformation as she talks to Franklin. Their encounter makes up the bulk of ‘Just Before the War With the Eskimos’. Selena’s older brother Franklin comes into the room – he is in his early 20s, kind of raggedy, in a bathrobe, and he has cut his finger. So that might be what is going on, because it seems like an odd reaction to a set of living room furniture. new money? There is NOTHING like the contempt old money has for new money. I’m not sure what’s going on there – if there are some issues going on here between Ginnie and Selena that I am not perceiving – issues coming to the foreground because of Selena’s cheapness and pettiness when it comes to paying her half of the cab fare. This is a world of privilege – we know that because it’s Salinger writing it, first of all – that is his milieu – urban privilege – Ginnie stares around the living room at all the furniture and has the desire to throw it all out the window. Selena is offended, pissed, defensive … says something about how her mother is sick … Ginnie is like, “I didn’t make her sick, did I?” Selena huffs off into her house to wake up her sick mother and get Ginnie the money she is owed – leaving Ginnie waiting in the living room. ![]() Ginnie finally has had it and brings it up to Selena. She starts the story annoyed because she always gets stuck with the whole cab fare on their tennis days … the cab drops Selena off and then goes on to drop Ginnie off, and Selena never leaves her any money. Ginnie and Selena are two high-school age girls who live in New York City and go to some upscale prep school. If you’re going to use symbolism, please do it subtly and let it sneak up on us – because otherwise the whole thing becomes way too top-heavy, and I end up feeling like you, the writer, are treating me, the reader, like I’m half-tard or quarter-tard. ![]() And THAT is what makes a good short story – because you have a limited amount of space. ![]() It brings a depth and power to the story that you might otherwise miss if you only read it as a surface encounter. How can a story 15 pages long have so much in it? And also contain so much mystery? Like the last line … which appears to come out of NOWHERE … but the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. But it’s such a TAUT story, so tightly wound … that I could spend days ruminating upon it. ‘Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut’ (excerpt here) is pretty straightforward, leaving not much to the imagination – It is what it says it is, the meaning and “event” of the story is clear – but ‘Perfect Day for Bananafish’ (excerpt here) and now ‘Just Before the War With the Eskimos’ … hides its meaning, cloaks its true intentions. It’s all THERE, it’s just a bit elusive – and it shifts if you try to put your finger on it. ![]() There is something going on in ‘Just Before the War With the Eskimos’ that somehow remains beneath the surface. It’s a joy to read these people, and it’s a joy to read JD Salinger. They are master enough that they can also mess with the form (AS Byatt) and get away with it. Like Lorrie Moore (excerpt here), Mary Gaitskill (excerpt here), James Joyce (excerpt here – although it is usually unfair to lump anyone else with James Joyce – even the good writers suffer from the comparison), AS Byatt (excerpt here) … These people are masters of the form. If you’ve ever tried to write a short story, you know how difficult it is … how to use symbols without being obvious, how to SHOW not TELL, all that … I love reading people who are masters of the form, because it feels easy in their hands. Salinger – excerpt from the third story ‘Just Before The War With the Eskimos’Ī story so compact, so perfectly structured, that if you remove one word the whole thing would unravel. ![]()
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