A History of Heart Technology

The history of artificial hearts serves as a backdrop to the story How to Talk to Your Mother. At first they appear to be just factoids that provide temporal context, which is especially important in this story, due to its lack of chronological order. Yet, more importantly, they serve to detail the emotional life of the main character.

This is first seen chronologically, in 1958, when her cousin asks about his uncle: “Did Uncle Will have a hard attack?” In 1959, we then see her at her father’s funeral. Combining these, it can be deduced that her father passed away from heart conditions. This serves as the basis for the heart theme. She has lost the primary male figure in her life and spends the rest of her life trying to find a new one, just as technology seeks to replace the heart.

In 1963, the temporary artificial heart is invented and she breaks up with the man she thought she would spend her life with. Here the man in her life is only able to heal her momentarily, she breaks up with him before the year’s end, just as the artificial heart is only good for a few hours. Four years later, “The first successful heart transplant is performed in South Africa” and her mother moves in with her. The heart details here shows how the mother is replacing the role her father played and supporting her emotionally. However, heart implants only last for a couple years and her mother will only be able to help the narrator’s mental health for a couple years, before her own mental health fades.

It is then many years until we hear the last snippet about cardiac technology, until 1982 (The first paragraph) when “The first polyurethane heart is surgically implanted". Going with the heart theme, this implies that she has found a “permanent” solution to the emotional damage her father’s heart attack caused years ago.  This is reinforced as she hears the person above her playing “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, an indication by the author that the protagonist has finally something or someone that will fill the void. Although the story suggests that she is still struggling mentally and leaves me wondering if this heart technology will be ephemeral as all the previous solutions.

Not Just Black and White

“This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” shows an interesting portrayal of race. The primary idea behind it is that it is not just black and white and I mean this quite literally. This story presents the idea that there are many different groups that are discriminated against. This idea that was previously explored in “Previous Condition”, in which Peter’s Jewish friend Jules, attempts to sympathize with Peter’s anguish by explaining that he has also been discriminated against for being Jewish.

This idea is shown through the Narrator’s Tunisian friend Boona. He is accused of stealing money from Ada by Pete, while they are at the nightclub. We are led to believe that this is true based on several people’s reports. However, Boona says otherwise and claims: “I think it is that Frenchman who say I am a thief. They think we are all thieves” (190). Clearly, he is insinuating that they are accusing him merely because he is Tunisian. Weather or not he did steal the money, it is very possible that this is true. Earlier, it was pointed out that he is unable to got out with French or White girls because he is Arab, so clearly it is common for him to be discriminated against. Intriguingly, this a dynamic that we have seen before, and if taken out of context, one could easily assume that it was between a white man and an African-American.

There are many parallels between the racism that the narrator receives in America and the ones that Boona is subjected to here. The most interesting one though, revolves around the use of the word “boy”. When the narrator gets off the boat in America, he is annoyed that he is being called a “boy”, which we can assume is a racially charged term given his reaction to it: “When will I ever get to be a man?” And his description of the man who said it: “This was the face I remembered, the face of nightmares” (164-165). This language then shows up again later in the book, however this time it is Pete, an African-American, using it to describe Boona, when he is telling the Narrator of Boona’s theft: “I fear your boy has goofed”. This is especially interesting to me as I would have thought Pete would be acquainted enough with that term to not use it. Yet its use appears to be the same in both case.

The racism against Boona was really quite disappointing to me, especially since it is indicated that the narrator views Europe as a safe-haven from racism. However, there is a possibility that this wasn’t racism.  Maybe Boona was imagining the racism just as the Narrator may have done earlier. I doubt this, but what do you think? Did Boona steal the money? And if not, was his accusation racially motivated?

The First and the Last

Nine stories was quite the collection, the titular stories explored a variety of topics and plot lines. Despite these differences, there are a large number of parallels between the first story, A Perfect Day For Bananafish, and the last story, Teddy. The most obvious similarity is the endings, both ended with sudden and quite dramatic deaths. However, both deaths were foreshadowed heavily in their respective stories. There is also a key difference between the two deaths and that is the atmosphere behind them. On one hand, there is Seymour’s suicide caused by his inability to cope with past events, and on the other there is Teddy’s death, which seemed to move Teddy on to the “next” part of his life. One death looked to the past while the other looked to the future.

The next similarity was the children, both stories had a protagonist under the age of 13 who possessed knowledge and ability far beyond their age. In Bananafish young Sybil simply walks up to and starts hanging out with Seymour, which is quite unexpected for her age. And then there is Teddy, a boy of unprecedented spiritual intelligence, his abilities dwarf not just all kids but essentially everyone in Western society. This theme of smart children, is seen not just in the first and last stories but throughout the book.

There are some lines in the stories that appear to allude to the other story. My favorite line by far is when Seymour refers to Muriel as “Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948”, clearly referencing the spiritual themes of Teddy. Overall, I feel that the similarities between these stories serves to highlight a couple key ideas. The first is the intelligence of kids, this is something that Salinger seems to bring up throughout the book, with a variety of hyper-competent young people. The other thing it details is the perception of death, through the contrast between the two stories’ death scenes, the stories highlight just how little people know about death and how to react to it.