This thesis is an analysis of J.D. Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" from both mythic-archetypal and gender-oriented perspectives. It looks specifically at the way a genderoriented reading allows one to interpret "Bananafish" as a radical reassessment of Carl Jung's ideas about the process of individuation, as well as Joseph Campbell's conception of what he describes as the monomyth in his The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The reader is asked to look at how patriarchal values have greatly

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... limited the development of these characters' identities over time, and the complex archetypal and mythic implications of this limitation.