"Along this road goes no one": Salinger's "Teddy" and the failure of love - J. D. Salinger - Critical Essay

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1998 by Anthony Kaufman

Intermingled with this sense of isolation is his emotional deadness, his fear and rejection of the feelings. He insists on this strongly everywhere--associating it, contemptuously, with poetry and sentiment. To Nicholson:

   I wish I knew why people think it's so important to be emotional.. .. My
   mother and father don't think a person's human unless he thinks a lot of
   things are very sad or very annoying or very--very unjust, sort of. My
   father gets very emotional even when he reads the newspaper. He thinks I'm
   inhuman. (186)

His reaction to his egoistic and irresponsible parents has been withdrawal, a suppression of anger and the deadening of his emotions. For Teddy, emotions are disturbing; the anger he feels must not be expressed. This becomes clear in a key diary entry--a self revealing fantasy, just as Seymour's fantasy of the Bananafish and Gedsudski's Laughing Man reveal their most significant inner feelings. After reminding himself to ask Professor Mandell not to send any more poetry books--those compilations of emotion and sentimentality--Teddy fantasizes:

   A man walks along the beach and unfortunately gets hit in the head by a
   coconut. His head unfortunately creaks open in two halves. Then his wife
   comes along the beach singing a song and sees the halves and recognizes
   them and picks them up. She gets very sad of course and cries heart
   breakingly. That is exactly where I am tired of poetry. Supposing the lady
   just picks up the 2 halves and shouts into them very angrily, `stop that!'
   (180)

The implications of this fantasy in regard to his own parents are suggestive: the husband is killed violently, in a farcical, cartoon fashion; the wife previously happy, becomes very sad when she recognizes what has happened, and cries heartbreakingly. The unfortunate man involved in this farcical fantasy is both Mr. McArdle, victim of his son's hostile fantasy, and Teddy himself, eliciting the grief and guilt he desires from his mother.

His last diary entry, October 28, 1952, reveals no significant plans for future action. Indeed, the nine letters written in the morning have a farewell quality, and the previous day's memo to look up the phrase "gift horse," becomes in the next and final day, the observation "Life is a gift horse in my opinion": that is, life is seemingly delightful and amazing; actually deadly. His final entry, "It will either happen today or February 14, 1958" (182), seems to suggest ongoing deliberation about suicide.

That Teddy targets Valentine's Day, with its suggestions of erotic love, as an appropriate day for his suicide suggests that another uneasiness disturbs the preadolescent Teddy and indeed helps to trigger his decision to end his life this day and not six years later. He feels anxiety concerning his new and disturbing awareness of sex. This is seen in his awareness of his mother's nude form, encircling arm, and attempted kiss, Ensign Matthewson's lipsticky mouth, the casual brush of the stewardess's hand (a huge, blond woman), against his hair. This sexual anxiety is further clarified by Teddy's fanciful notion that in a previous life his spiritual development was going very well indeed, until sexuality entered in. His spiritual advancement was abruptly halted when "I met a lady and I sort of stopped meditating" (188). Typically of such Salinger figures, he qualifies and digresses--but there was a fall: "I wouldn't have had to get incarnated in an American body if I hadn't meet that lady" (188).