and Vedantic concepts of existence.” Teddy’s tolerance of his sister is due to his understanding that few reincarnations have contributed to the six-year old’s spiritual development. Booper’s misanthropic persona make plausible her role in the sinister and unsettling denouement at the swimming pool. Bob Nicholson The final vignette occurs on the Sun Deck. Bob Nicholson, a teacher at Trinity College, Dublin, is acquainted with some members of the Leidekker group who examined Teddy; he engages the boy in an ad hoc interview. This serves two purposes in Salinger’s story. First, he functions as a foil to Teddy, posing logical questions challenging the tenets of Vendantic and Zen philosophy. Salinger uses this device to respond to hostile skeptics among his readers. According to Slawenski, Nicholson “embodies the logic that poisons God-consciousness, and he represents the power of the intellect to blind individuals from spiritual truth.” Nicholson additionally functions as a witness to Teddy’s final discourse on the nature of existence and death, in which the boy formulates the circumstances that might lead to his reincarnation. In a lull in their exchange, Teddy becomes momentarily distracted by an inner voice or vision, and spontaneously recites to Nicholson two haiku by the 17th Century poet Bashō: “Nothing in the voice of the cicada intimates how soon it will die” and “Along this road goes no one, this autumn eve.” Nicholson, pursuing Teddy to the indoor swimming pool, hears, but does not see, the event that the boy prophesied, providing the reader with tantalizing evidence that leaves the boy's ultimate fate a mystery. The "swimming pool ending" The ending of Salinger’s “Teddy” has been described as “controversial” and “the most widely criticized ending of any story that he ever wrote.” Salinger thrice provides the reader with intimations of Teddy’s demise: in statements to his parents, in his diary and to Nicholson. This has led readers to interpret the final passage as confirmation of the boy’s premonition i.e. Booper shoves her older brother into the empty concrete pool and screams when she sees the deadly consequences. Slawenski reports two additional interpretations that might be derived from the final passage. One option is that Teddy “recognizing the threat his sister poses” evades her thrust and pushes her to her death, as act of premeditated murder. A third option is that both children plunge into the empty basin when Teddy carries Booper with him off the precipice