J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [132]
After finding Booper and making plans to meet at the swimming pool, Teddy settles into a lounge chair on the sundeck and begins to add to his diary. As he writes, Bob Nicholson, an academic from an unnamed university who has heard one of Teddy’s taped interviews during a party, approaches him. He imposes himself on Teddy and begins to pepper him with philosophical questions. Nicholson’s character serves two purposes. Salinger uses him as a sounding board against which Teddy can express Vedantic and Zen viewpoints that Nicholson reacts to skeptically. He treats Teddy not as a child or even as a human being but as a thing of intellectual curiosity. In short, Nicholson embodies the logic that poisons God-consciousness, and he represents the power of the intellect to blind individuals from spiritual truths.
Through Teddy, Salinger clarifies major tenets of Vedanta. He points out the difference between love and sentimentality, which he claims to be an “unreliable” emotion. Expounding on the philosophy of nonattachment, Teddy explains that the body is merely a shell and outward things are not reality. Only unity with God is real. Teddy is detached from those outward appearances because he is enlightened and sees only the godliness within.
To make these points clear to Western minds, Salinger uses a common Judeo-Christian image: the fall of Adam and Eve from grace. Teddy tells Bob that what Adam and Eve ate in the Garden of Eden was an apple containing logic and intellectuality and that one should vomit it from the system. The trouble, he explains, is that people don’t want to see the way things actually are and that they are attached to their physical existence far more than they are connected to God.
From the subjects of logic and reincarnation, the topic turns to death. Teddy explains death as being a progression of life, giving himself as an example. He reveals that he has a swimming lesson in five minutes and points out that he could arrive for his lesson unaware that the pool is empty of water. He could walk to the edge of the pool, be pushed in by his sister, and fracture his skull. Yet he feels that were he to die in this way, it would not be tragedy. “I’d just be doing what I was supposed to do,” he reasons, “wouldn’t I?”
The story’s most mystical event is a quiet one and nearly invisible. Soon after Nicholson settles into the lounge chair next to Teddy, Teddy becomes unfocused, his attention mysteriously diverted to the area of the sports deck where the swimming pool is—as if hearing some inner voice coming from that direction. Lost in whatever thoughts have mesmerized him, Teddy absentmindedly interrupts Nicholson with a haiku written by Bashō: “Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die.”
After Teddy leaves for his swimming lesson, Nicholson sits in contemplation of their discussion. Suddenly he springs from the deck chair and races through the ship to the area of the pool. Salinger then presents the most widely criticized ending of any story that he ever published. Having not quite reached the pool, Nicholson hears
an all-piercing, sustained scream—clearly coming from a small, female child. It was highly acoustical, as though it were reverberating within four tiled walls.26
Most readers have interpreted the closing lines of “Teddy” as indicating Teddy’s death at the hands of Booper. This conclusion is derived from Teddy’s own prediction rather than the text itself. Salinger’s words intimate that it is Booper, and not Teddy, who screams from within the empty pool. The reader, therefore, is left with three options. Booper may well have pushed her brother into the pool in an act of cold-blooded murder—as Teddy had predicted. Yet, according to the text, it is just as likely that Teddy, recognizing the threat that his sister poses, pushes her over the edge before she has the chance