Banana

Banana
By Nathan W. Hill
I was hungry and the sun impaled me on its searing ray. I wore a wool coat, black
with red cotton lining. It had served me well in the misty foothills of the Himalayas,
where His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, gave his blessing. The coat had recently returned from a long absence. I wore it despite the heat.
The humid weather and the final wilting blossoms of late September conspired to fill my head with snot. The mighty hammer, Mjollnir, pounded his lament between my ears.
I walked down to The Barn, our cafeteria, but it wouldn't open again until three. Then, I remembered Clint, my junior year English teacher, and walked back to the
Upper School. Clint always kept a few overripe bananas in the fruit bowl with the past due vocab tests. Laura, who shared the office, complained of the fetid smell of rotten fruit and that Clint made grunting noises as he worked hunched in his bow tie,
over a mound of disheveled papers. On occasion, he stretched his arm towards
Laura's desk and asked her, with a bruised banana dangling from his hand, "Would you like a banana, Laura?" With a crinkled nose, Laura always politely replied, "No, thank you, Clint," and watched in disgust as he wolfed it down.
The heavy wooden door to Clint's office stood propped open because of the heat.
Inside, a small electric fan sat on top of the computer, it made an obnoxious noise
between the sound of buzzing bees and chomping teeth. A tiny strip of paper darted before the spinning blades. Clint looked up from his work and asked with nasal condescension, "Can I help you, Nate?"
I responded phlegmatically, "May I have a banana?" the sweat dripping off the end
of my nose.
With a mixture of pity and reproach, he raised his arm to point at the wooden bowl on top of the gray file cabinet. I lifted three vocab tests away.
I grabbed it, soft and brown. Its sweet aroma distracted me from the throbbing of
my head. I held the banana in my right hand, and moved my left hand to its stem, ready to divest my prey.
A thin sticky liquid started seeping through my hand. Not expecting a banana to leak I dropped it, and heard a low thud, followed by splattering.
The banana burst open; its mushy yellow guts flew. A dripping peel remained of my search for happiness.
ANALYSIS
Hill has taken the basic narrative form in this essay and transformed it into something memorable. While Hill has alluded to the fact that he was in the Himalayas and that he was given a blessing by the Dalai Lama, he does not dwell on
those events, however significant or unique. Rather, he chooses to concentrate on simple topics: hunger and a coveted banana.
The strength of Hill's essay rests with his descriptive language. The end of the essay
particularly impacts the reader with vivid imagery. Few who read this essay will forget the image of an overripe banana exploding. Hill's phrasing is at times perfect:"…ready to divest my prey," is one such example of convincing, powerful
language. Hill has conveyed the exact magnitude of his hunger and desire for that
banana with this phrase.
A few areas could be strengthened, however. Hill is somewhat meandering in his opening, touching on topics like the Dalai Lama and the Himalayas, which though interesting are not significant to the main thrust of the narrative. Also, Hill's use of
dialogue and the description of Clint and Laura are a little awkward. He might have
done better to have simply expanded upon the latter paragraphs of his essay, focusing more on the banana and his hunger and omitting this dialogue and the
description of Clint. Despite these small complications, Hill has done the trick and
produced an essay that demands attention and respect.