It was about eight o'clock at night, and dark, and raining, and freezing, and the wind was noisy the way it is in spooky movies on the night the old slob with the will gets murdered. I stood by the cannon on the top of Thomsen Hill, freezing to death, watching the big south windows of the gym—shining big and bright and dumb, like the windows of a gymnasium, and nothing else (but maybe you never went to a boarding school).
The first-person narrator is a character quite familiar to many, thought certainly familiar as a result of this story. Here is a prototype of Salinger’s most famous character: Holden Caulfield. There are certain obvious differences between the Holden here and that catcher in the rye guy. For one thing, in the transition to novel, Holden and Phoebe lose an additional sister named Viola. Also, more subtle perhaps, is the tone of the narration. Salinger is still working out the details of what he wants from Holden and he’s just not quite there yet.
He was little more than halfway down the staircase when he heard an all-piercing, sustained scream – clearly coming from a small, female child. It was highly acoustical, as though it were reverberating within four tiled walls.
The closing line of this story is one of the most infamous that Salinger ever wrote. The story is about a precocious young boy named Teddy who is kind of a like a Zen savant. The story takes place on a cruise ship and Teddy has been saying some pretty cryptic things. But Teddy also has a younger sister named Booper who is like an anti-Zen master. Booper is pretty unlikable. And the “he” his more than halfway down the staircase is a guy named Bob who hears what is almost certainly the sound of Booper screaming. But the question lingers: is it a scream of victim or perpetrator?
Paula returned to Otisville and several months later resumed her work as a librarian. She’s still there today doing a brilliant job of it.
If the final line of “Teddy” is one of the most controversially ambiguous endings that Salinger ever composed, then it safe to say that the final line of this exercise in horror is certainly up there among the most ironic. This macabre story begins on a note that is notable for its generic quality. The reader is offered the date and exact time and a description of Mr. Hincher coming home to find his wife Paula reading in bed. From there the narrative weaves and wanders through a story that could have been a collaboration between filmmaker Larry Cohen and literary king of suburbia John Cheever on its way to this ending which may seem equally generic but is, in fact, one of the most ironic endings most people will ever read.
“He very definitely told your father there's a chance--a very great chance, he said--that Seymour may completely lose control of himself.”
There is foreshadowing. And then there is foreshadowing. At first, it only seems perhaps somewhat likely that this is foreshadowing. In point of fact, Seymour Glass for most of the story seems like a very nice and normal guy. He is especially indulgent with children and especially with Sybil, whose mother is a tart, a lush and not a very good mother at all in general. But after his rather sweet time spent on the beach essentially babysitting Sybil, Seymour rather shockingly turns and it becomes immediately apparent that the concern expressed by the doctor to the mother to convey to the wife is not an example of mere foreshadowing.
