How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Story.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
I'd been interested in the fact that my brother had asked his fiancée to meet him in a hotel lobby, rather than at his empty, available apartment. The morality of the invitation was by no means out of character, but it interested me, mildly, nonetheless. ("Roof Beam" 2.35)
This is a subtle point, but one that the author goes out of his way to make sure we notice. (He will later reiterate that Seymour has not seduced Muriel.) Seymour has kept his relationship chaste, and this speaks a great deal to his character and his relationship with Muriel.
Quote #2
For the first time in several minutes, I glanced around at tile tiny elderly man with the unlighted cigar. The delay didn't seem to affect him. His standard of comportment for sitting in the rear scat of cars - cars in motion, cars stationary, and even, one couldn't help imagining, cars that were driven off bridges into rivers - seemed to be fixed. It was wonderfully simple. You just sat very erect, maintaining a clearance of four or five inches between your top hat and the roof, and you stared ferociously ahead at the windshield. If Death - who was out there all the time, possibly sitting on the hood - if Death stepped miraculously through the glass and came in after you, in all probability you just got up and went along with him, ferociously but quietly. Chances were, you could take your cigar with you, if it was a clear Havana. ("Roof Beam" 2.68)
This is where we first get a sense of the spiritual significance of this character. His is a sort of Zen-like serenity, one that is not disturbed by any outside influences. We can start to see why Buddy is so drawn to him, particularly in the stifling, uncomfortable setting.
Quote #3
[The Matron of Honor]: "I don't know how much you know about people. But what man in his right mind, the night before he's supposed to get married, keeps his fiancée up all night blabbing to her all about how he's too nappy to get married and that she'll have to post pone the wedding till he feels steadier or he won't be able to come to it? Then, when his fiancée explains to him like a child that everything's been arranged and planned out for months, […] then, after she explains all that, he says to her he's terribly sorry but he can't get married till he feels less happy or some crazy thing!" ("Roof Beam" 2.99)
We can associate Seymour's need to be "steadier" with the sort of Zen-like calm embodied by the bride's father's uncle. Seymour feels that something as intense as marriage can't be approached with any attitude other than steady, spiritual calm.
Quote #4
I glanced past and behind her, furtively, at the fifth passenger - the tiny elderly man - to see if his insularity was still intact. It was. No one's indifference has ever been such a comfort to me. ("Roof Beam" 2.114)
This is an important line; here our earlier suspicions as to the bride's father's uncle are confirmed. We wonder, though, how much of the "comfort" is just in Buddy's head. That is, does he simply convince himself that the elderly man is a sort of ally or is he actually one?
Quote #5
(It isn't easy, to this day, to account for the Matron of Honor's having included me in her invitation to quit the ship. It may simply have been inspired by a born leader's natural sense of orderliness. She may have had some sort of remote but compulsive urge to make her landing party complete.... My singularly immediate acceptance of the invitation strikes me as much more easily explainable. I prefer to think it was a basically religious impulse. In certain Zen monasteries, it's a cardinal rule, if not the only serious enforced discipline, that when one monk calls out 'Hi!' to another monk, the latter must call back 'Hi!' without thinking.) ("Roof Beam" 2.131)
Here Salinger explicitly draws our attention to the spiritual undercurrent running through this story. This is our hint to keep looking for other connections to aspects of Zen in the story.
Quote #6
It was a grin that was no less resplendent for the fact that it made no sense whatever. Nor for the fact that his teeth were obviously, beautifully, transcendently false. ("Roof Beam" 2.133)
What odd adjectives to describe false teeth. What is Buddy getting at here?
Quote #7
"It's closed for alterations," [the Matron of Honor] stated coldly, looking at me. Unofficially bat unmistakably, she was appointing me odd-man-out again, and at that moment, for no reason worth going into, I felt a sense of isolation and loneliness more overwhelming than I'd felt all day. Somewhat simultaneously, it's worth noting, my cough reactivated itself. I pulled my handkerchief out of my hip pocket. ("Roof Beam" 2.143)
Look at the connection between the physical and the emotional here. Now we can start thinking about Buddy's cough in a more symbolic way.
Quote #8
I think one most recurrently hears about the curiously-productive-though-ailing poet or painter is that he is invariably a kind of […]Sick Man who […] gives out terrible cries of pain, as if he would wholeheartedly let go both his art and his soul to experience what passes in other people for wellness, and yet (the rumor continues) when […] someone who actually loves him […] passionately asks him where the pain is, he either declines or seems unable to discuss it at any constructive clinical length, and […] he looks more perversely determined than ever to see his sickness run its course, as though […] he had remembered that all men […] eventually die, […] but that he […] is at least being done in by the most stimulating companion […] he has ever known. ("Seymour" 1.2)
This is an interesting concept –the connection between brilliant artistry and painful sickness – and it's a real favorite of Salinger's over the course of many of his works. An illustrative line on this matter comes from another of Salinger's stories, "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period": "The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly. This is not a tragic situation, in my opinion." This possibly has a lot to do with the discussions of happiness both in "Roof Beam" and in "Seymour."
Quote #9
And I'm reminded, too, that once, when we were boys, Seymour waked me from a sound sleep, much excited, yellow pajamas flashing in the dark. He had what my brother Walt used to call his Eureka Look, and lie wanted to tell the that he thought he finally knew why Christ said to call no man Fool. ("Seymour" 1.15)
This is interesting – the color yellow is important in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," the story of Seymour's suicide, as possible representing innocence and purity. Buddy may be cross-referencing his other works yet again.