This chapter explores metaphoric interpretations of the short story ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’, by J. D. Salinger, by real readers. The metaphoric interpretation of the story plays a crucial role in the perception of narrative coherence. In order to analyse how real readers build such metaphorical interpretations, a five item questionnaire was completed by 36 Spanish university students. The questions elicit the readers’ interpretations of the story ending with the protagonist’s suicide, together with reference to textual clues, the interpretation of the title and the metaphoric interpretations of the bananafish tale within the story as a whole. Results show that students process the ending of the short story in relation to clues they identified in the first two scenes together with their background knowledge regarding the genre of twentieth-century short stories. Most students were able to provide detailed metaphorical scenarios to account for the role of the bananafish tale within the short story and as a title to the story. In their explanation of metaphoric meanings, students used a variety of comparative forms and paraphrases to introduce the mappings between source and target domains.