A Perfect Day for a Bananafish

When I reread A Perfect Day for a Banana Fish with my goggles on, my perspective really changed.  At first when reading the few moments that involve sunscreen, I did not think twice about it.  However when we talked about it in class, and pointed out that sunscreen was mentioned a couple times, I realized that this was not a coincidence.  Jacob and Matt pointed out that Sybil's mom let her go run off alone on the beach and hang out with a random man on page 15.  Before letting Sybil run loose, Mrs. Carpenter was "...Putting sun-tan oil on Sybil's shoulders, spreading it down over the delicate, winglike blades of her back" (15).  Before this, sunscreen is also mentioned while Muriel is speaking to her mom on the phone.  "You're badly sunburned? Didn't you use that jar of Bronze I put in your bag? I put it right - "(9).  Both times, the parents think that by putting sunscreen on (or in Muriel's case giving her a jar of sunscreen) they are protecting their child.  Neither of them realize that this protection they have given them is insufficient, and this leads to both Muriel and Sybil (nearly) being harmed.  Muriel's mother was trying to protect her from Seymour, and she warned her multiple times about him, but at the end of the story Muriel still got burned by him, when Seymour shot himself on page 26.  In Sybil's case, she was very lucky.  Although her mom left her two year old daughter alone on the beach, she still put sunscreen on her which in this case (metaphorically) protects Sybil from a strange man on the beach that she knows as "sea more glass."