Seymour Glass, John Kennedy Toole, J. D. Salinger, And Turning 32

Seymour Glass is a fictional character created by J. D. Salinger, and at the end of the short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," Seymour Glass, age 31, *spoiler alert* takes out a gun and kills himself.

John Kennedy Toole is the author of the novel A Confederacy of Dunces, which was thoroughly rejected and unpublished at the time of his suicide, at the age of 31.

It literally felt surreal when I woke up on my 30th birthday. In my youth I thought for sure I would have killed myself by that point. I thought I would have ended myself long before I ever reached the stage of life that I considered to be Undeniable Adulthood. 

My first suicidal thought arrived in my early teens (my theory for why that is requires a book series to do it justice, and I haven't written it yet), and while Death's hands have many fingers, there is one finger that taps those who eventually deliver themselves unto the altar of nonexistence—those who walk up and willingly impale themselves on the mortal scythe.

And yet I awoke that morning—30 years old, one of the biggest losers in the history of modernity, and still alive and blinking.

In a very confusing way, I was proud of myself, and in a different confusing way, I was disappointed in myself. Either way, I was 30, and I had to accept it.

And now I'm 31, soon to be 32.

My mother has always said that I wear my heart on my sleeve, but I think I can't help but be transparent because of something innate in who I am. It stands to reason that if there are emotionally impassive people—people who either don't care or just can't easily be rattled from their level cool—then there must be people whose emotions are huge gusts in the sail of the self. 

In fact, I feel as though I am excruciatingly pulverized by nearly every facet of existence, and I've always wanted to believe that there was a virtue in my being pulverized: I would appreciatively take the pain of having my eyes blasted open by the brilliance and depravity of existence, for it would make me a better artist! (It would have to!)

In J. D. Salinger's heretofore published stories about the Glass family, Seymour Glass is a recognized authority in the world of words, and he is the author of what a successful writer (his brother, "Buddy Glass") considers to be the finest poetry this side of the Asian continent. My reading of "A Perfect Day" holds that Seymour, in his curious encounter with the the Bananafish-spotting little girl on the beach, becomes overwhelmed by his inability to deal with the great expanses of thought and feeling produced within himself by the tremendous world, and he can't swim to the surface anymore because he's eaten so many bananas, and he kills himself.

Seymour Glass's oceans of thought and emotion led to a literary success and a mental collapse.

And then there's John Kennedy Toole, who was so brilliant that he wrote a book that eventually won a Pulitzer, but who was so tortured by that book's repeated lack of publishing success that he got in his car and bid a carbon-monoxide goodbye to a world that clearly didn't want him and the beautiful art that he'd created and loved so much.

Ten years after the goodbye, his mother got the book published, and it won the most prestigious award a piece of literature can receive. 

It's one of the best novels ever written—not that any of these postmortem accolades mean anything to Toole's bones.

Anyway, I feel a great affinity for and simpatico with both Seymour Glass and John Kennedy Toole, and yet I am about to turn 32, which, to me, signifies that I am a man who is wretchedly tortured by an oversensitive disposition, but not to the extent that it will ever lead to transcendent artistic success, and it also tells me that I am nauseatingly tortured by the complete rejection my words and I have received on every possible level of literary life, but not to the extent that a real-life, truly great writer was.

I'm going to be 32 in early September.

I'm just some fucking guy.

What's killing me is that I am thoroughly convinced that I'm better than what I am in life right now, but what if I'm not? 

If what I am is what I don't want to be anymore, and which I have now spent years proving I can't change, then why should I want to be at all?

Is that what they concluded?

Maybe.

In light of the news that Salinger's estate is set to release five new books in the coming years, I also have to wonder if sensitive Seymour still would have killed himself if one of his beloved dead Japanese poets had five new manuscripts on the way.

Maybe he would have at least given it a few moments of thought before he woke up his wife like that.