On rereading RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS, I came to remember the core of Seymour's trouble; the existence of Charlotte and the unending pursuit of a femme-enfant. And interestingly, the anecdotic charm of Charlotte comes mostly from two elements: violence (slight but dangerously menacing) and accent (verbal).
Here is how Buddy our narrator reports about her:
"On certain nights when he was in especially good form, Seymour used to come home with a slight limp. That's really true. Charlotte didn't just step on his foot, she tramped on it. He didn't care. He loved people who stepped on his feet. He loved noisy girls." (81)
And then:
"We were playing stoopball on the side of the building one afternoon after school, Seymour and I, and somebody who turned out to be Charlotte started dropping marbles on us from the twelfth story. That's how we met. We got her on the program that same week. We didn't even know she could sing. We just wanted her because she had such a beautiful New Yorkese accent. She had a Dyckman street accent." (82)
As a self-contained novella, this work doesn't hold well. But Salinger is brilliant in his unexpected move from one sentence to another. The real weakness, then, comes from Seymour's only partially developped (throughout the saga) character.
It has been construed that Seymour stands for "See more." To me, it's "Say amour." And on saying that a dark shade is already ripe in the name.
