| This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise | |
| Author: | J. D. Salinger |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Published In: | Esquire |
| Pub Date: | October 1945 |
"This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise" is an uncollected work of short fiction by J. D. Salinger which appeared in the October 1945 issue of Esquire.[1] [2] The story was published in the 1958 anthology The Armchair Esquire, edited by Arnold Gingrich and L. Rust Hills.
"This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise" is the seventh of Salinger's nine works dealing with members of the Caulfield family.[3]
The story describes Vincent Caulfield's experience at a Georgia boot camp before embarking for the war.[4] He is upset because his brother Holden (as described in "Last Day of the Last Furlough") is missing in action, and is unable to accept the possibility Holden may be dead.[5] [6]
Though none of Salinger's correspondence reveals the precise evolution of the story, "This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise" was completed in late 1944 when Salinger was serving with US Army units fighting the Schnee Eifel and Hürtgen Forest. Biographer Kenneth Slawenski speculates on how this reality may have affected Salinger's handling of the story:
In "This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise," Salinger uses a present-tense internal monologue to examine the anguished speculation of an older brother, Vincent, obsessing over his beloved younger brother Holden, who is reported missing-in-action while serving in combat during World War II.[7] Salinger develops a narrative "completely within Vincent's tortured mind."[8] His distracted worry borders on panic and paranoia:
In "one of the more remarkable passages in Salinger's work," Vincent indulges in an idealized recollection of Holden and his siblings, Red and Phoebe, which resembles the protagonists in The Catcher in the Rye (1951):
"This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise" is evidence of Salinger's early interest in themes concerning the reconstruction of an idealized past, as in the Glass family stories.[9]