Teddy (story)

In the opening scene set in the Mr. and Mrs. McArdle's state room, Salinger presents two facets of Zen enlightenment: "God-consciousness", a profound awareness of "inner spirit", in contrast to material concerns, and secondly, "the notion of impermanence", based on "the Vedantic belief that separate existence is an illusion."[9]

Teddy, perched on a piece of luggage, pokes his head through the open porthole, penetrating figuratively into a zone of enlightenment and sublimity; his body remains in the cabin, where his parents – “materialistic and self-centered” – engage in mildly abusive repartee, issuing petulant and ineffectual commands to their son, who endures them with tolerant detachment.[10] Teddy’s astonishing self-possession is a product of his adherence to Vedantic “philosophy of non-attachment”, enabling him to distinguish between “the world of illusion” – the material world – and “the world of reality”, where “only unity of God is real.”[11]

The boy focuses his attention on some discarded orange peel suspended momentarily on the ocean surface; as they sink out of sight, he engages in “solipsistic contemplation. Teddy conveys his revelation to his parents: “After I go out this door, I may only exist in the minds of all my acquaintances…I may be an orange peel.” His mother and father, victims of their spiritual “immaturity”, are incapable of grasping his warning that they may never see him again. Salinger issues this Vedantic premonition to the reader as a clue to Teddy’s fate.[12]

The same studied disengagement that characterizes Teddy’s relationship with his parents also informs the “amazing” toleration he exhibits toward his younger sister – a child that biographer Kenneth Slawenski describes as “a cruel little girl” and “perhaps the most vicious child ever discharged by Salinger’s imagination.”[13]

When Booper announces that she “hates everybody in the ocean”, Salinger calls attention to the setting of his story: the sea, with its infinite horizons and indefinite boundaries where his characters drift – a seascape that reflects “the Zen and Vedantic concepts of existence.”[14]

Teddy’s tolerance of his sister is due to his understanding that few reincarnations have contributed to the six-year old’s spiritual development.[15] Booper’s misanthropic persona make plausible her role in the sinister and unsettling denouement at the swimming pool.

The final vignette occurs on the Sun Deck. Bob Nicholson, a teacher at Trinity College, Dublin, is acquainted with some members of the Leidekker group who examined Teddy; he engages the boy in an ad hoc interview.[16] This serves two purposes in Salinger’s story. First, he functions as a foil to Teddy, posing logical questions challenging the tenets of Vendantic and Zen philosophy. Salinger uses this device to respond to hostile skeptics among his readers.[17] According to Slawenski, Nicholson “embodies the logic that poisons God-consciousness, and he represents the power of the intellect to blind individuals from spiritual truth.”[18]

Nicholson additionally functions as a witness to Teddy’s final discourse on the nature of existence and death, in which the boy formulates the circumstances that might lead to his reincarnation. In a lull in their exchange, Teddy becomes momentarily distracted by an inner voice or vision, and spontaneously recites to Nicholson two haiku by the 17th Century poet Bashō: “Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die” and “Along this road goes no one, this autumn eve.”[19]

Nicholson, pursuing Teddy to the indoor swimming pool, hears, but does not see, the event that the boy prophesied, providing the reader with tantalizing evidence that leaves the boy's ultimate fate a mystery.

The ending of Salinger’s “Teddy” has been described as “controversial” [20] and “the most widely criticized ending of any story that he ever wrote.”[21]

Salinger thrice provides the reader with intimations of Teddy’s demise: in statements to his parents, in his diary and to Nicholson. This has led readers to interpret the final passage as confirmation of the boy’s premonition i.e. Booper shoves her older brother into the empty concrete pool and screams when she sees the deadly consequences.[22]

Slawenski reports two additional interpretations that might be derived from the final passage. One option is that Teddy “recognizing the threat his sister poses” evades her thrust and pushes her to her death, as act of premeditated murder.[23] A third option is that both children plunge into the empty basin when Teddy carries Booper with him off the precipice – in order to advance her into her next reincarnation.[24] "None of these" says Slawenski, "is very satisfying."

Critics of the story may have targeted the ending for disapproval, rather than engage in a culturally biased critique of Salinger’s foray into Zen philosophy.[25]

Salinger himself regarded the work as “exceptionally Haunting [sic]” and “memorable” yet “unpleasantly controversial” and “thoroughly unsuccessful.”[26]