Little Ramona from “Uncle Wiglis in Connecticut” lives better with her imaginary friends than with her parents. The father is absent, the mother mourns her true love, lost in the war.

Of course, it is known that too much light is blinding, not only in the dark we see poorly. Salinger illuminates scenes with unparalleled skill, not only directs them, but also allows their light to be reflected on the viewer-reader, leaving no room for him, he will close his eyes for a while, of course, and when he opens them again, nothing will be like a few minutes earlier .

The first story in A Perfect Day for a Banana Fish, an iconic and a lesson in writing in its own right, runs like an invisible thread through the seams of subsequent stories. The reader in Banana Fish is watching a good existential thriller. It all starts with a telephone conversation between mother and daughter, a conversation that has sighs and pauses and noises so that the conversation is more “heard” than read. Through what is said and mostly what is left unsaid, a hero emerges who appears shortly after, a man completely surrendered to his inner trauma from contact with the army. A phone call sharpens the reader’s anxiety, who is suddenly transported to the opposite atmosphere of restlessness, an ordinary and calm beach. There, by the sea, on the sand, the last remnant of the lost human paradise appears, sitting on its throne a rubber sea ball, Sybil, the first of the children we meet in a key role in most stories.

Salinger in seven of the nine stories pays literary homage to the child and everything connected with him. In The Banana Fish, Sybil is the last refuge of a broken young man, his last attempt to maintain the innocence and playfulness that shines even in the adversities of life. The hero invents a story about a banana fish to amuse the girl, and tells it to convince himself that imaginary creatures become real when we talk about them. Since joy is a fantasy, a dream, he tries to evoke it, hope always provides temporary relief. The next moment, as happens in a dream, he lands on the pain that overtakes him and surrenders to her in a sharp, sudden finale. After an angry but seemingly minor incident in an elevator, a young man kills himself, which seems to be the natural result of his return to the room from the sea.

The failure to clean up the war and its horror is also shown in his story titled “For Esme, with Terror and Love”. The hero here is also a soldier, mentally broken, he is also a writer. Salinger essentially declares from the very beginning that he is behind the hero, because what matters is not who the hero is, but what he represents, since here the story was written for all those young people who during the Second World War did not leave behind them only at home and loved ones, but they themselves.

In Devon, England, on a rainy day, the hero first sees Esme, a teenager who charmed him with her voice at a local choir rehearsal, and then meets her again and they strike up a conversation in a candy store. Children’s voices, young girls, a church dominated by music, and there is a life that those who went to fight cannot have. It is no coincidence that the choir consists mainly of girls between the ages of six and thirteen, this is the age when love still seems ideal, promising as the future, unattainable, like women left behind by soldiers, is thought of as something they can only admire and look forward to.

In the story “For Esme, with Horror and Love”, Salinger also explores the meaning of the “order” to the writer, before parting, Esme takes from him a promise to write a story for her. The soldier-writer, like any writer, cannot escape from his heroes, who almost demand that he speak for them. Like Banana Fish, the ending is dark and inevitably heartbreaking. After the light interlude of meeting with Esme, as with Sybil in Banana Fish, there comes despondency, irrepressible internal damage, the hero describes it, comparing himself to a Christmas tree, the lights of which go out when at least one burns.

Little Ramona from Uncle Wiglis in Connecticut lives better with her imaginary friends than her real parents. Absent father and cold and distant mother, Eloise mourns her true love lost in the war and seizes the opportunity to drown in alcohol and nostalgia in the company of her old friend while it snows, mud and slush outside. Through a neglected, loveless little girl, Salinger struggles with the disappointment of innocence, the pure and white hope of youth, stained like snow by the disappointments of adults.

The letter and the Trojan horse of life

Unfulfilled expectations also concern the author of the story “Down in the Boat”. The boy, who from a very early age has a tendency to run away, his inability to stay in one place and communicate, is all a reflection of his mother, who, in turn, fluctuates between the roles of new wife and mother. The linguistic confusion of a child who turns from a pejorative jargon for Jews into the word kite (instead of “Jew”, “kite”), in the most direct and intelligent way, says that in children’s souls, unlike adults, there is no place for discrimination and hatred.

From protecting childhood from prejudice and ugliness, Salinger crosses a bridge in Just Before the Eskimo War to reach the turmoil of youth. His heroine is torn between the former purity of childhood and the need to adapt to adult reality and tries to cling to the minimum expectation of an uncertain relationship. Her friend’s brother breaks her dynamism, her only balance, and holds a half-eaten sandwich he gives her as a charm, as he once did with a dead Easter chicken. Already a harbinger that the life that has opened before her will be full of halves already used, as well as love that will end, ascends in the midst of the warlike climate in the country.

In his short story Laughing, Salinger reflects on writing after the war, the loss and cancellation of his other stories. The nine-year-old protagonist, who may be a child writer himself, is fascinated, as are his friends at the club, by the story their coach keeps telling them about Gelastos, a deformed being with superpowers. The ecstasy that this story evokes in the little one is its main feature of “mobility”. The myth of “Laughter” is an ideal state, a story that, in addition to being told or listened to anywhere, he takes it with him, he will think about it in a few days, it will become part of his daily life.

Accordingly, like a playful study, with a dose of self-mockery, “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” from the point of view of the young alter-ego of the author contains his attitude to art, talent, the mystical process of writing, as the remark made by the hero in his a letter to a charismatic nun that turning (the nun) into an artist would be a constant misfortune.

As in A Perfect Day for a Banana Fish, the first of the series, so in the final story, “Teddy,” Salinger again refers to a child who foresees his own death to explain his own symbolism as a possible reason why children are the protagonists of his stories. Teddy from the short story of the same name is a strange boy with unprecedented powers of observation, stoicism in the face of death and wisdom. Salinger, himself a child stuck in the body of an adult, has the same damn gift as Teddy, to predict behavior and interpret it in its purest form, without the filter of social conventions and circumstances. According to Teddy, the child, Salinger, the writer – many faces speaking through one – life is a Trojan horse, and only a letter can and should penetrate a wooden panel and guess its contents before it is destroyed. is hiding.

* A collection of short stories by Ms. Eleni Karamagiolis “Isolating Film” published by Iolkos.