Key line for Bananafish

"Well they swim into a hole where there's a lot of bananas. They're very ordinary-looking fish when they swim in. But once they get in, they behave like pigs. Why, I've known some banana fish to swim into a banana hole and eat as many as seventy-eight bananas. Naturally, after that they're so fat they can't get out of the hole again" (23). This quote is a key line because Seymour expresses how he feels about how people feel after they experienced the tragedies of war. Salinger uses the fish as a metaphor for the innocent minds of the soldiers before going to fight in WWII. Seymour then goes on to talk about how the soldiers eat "as many as seventy-eight bananas", which means that the bananas represent the traumatic events in war and the fish (soldiers) get so filled up with the horrible memories that they can barely see straight again. The soldiers can barley see straight again because Salinger writes, "after that they're [the bananafish] so fat they can't get out of the hole again" meaning that they are so traumatized by the tragedies of war and get get the memories out of their head, they can't feel normal again and fit in with society anymore.