Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger's (1951)

Extract

[...] This also suggests that the narrator is aware that Holden, the character, is boring, is a disappointing Tom Sawyer, as he always evades adventure. Another good example is Chapter when Holden calls Faith Cavendish, who's supposed to be an easy woman, to ask her out; he fails to get a date for tonight, but doesn't think of rescheduling the date, even though she thinks he sounds ‘attractive' and suggests they ‘get together for cocktails tomorrow'. V. Writing strategy Holden is a bad student, but Salinger makes his novel credible by making Holden good in English composition (15). [...]

[...] The thing is, it's really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs – if you are really good ones and theirs aren't. You think if they're intelligent and all, the other person, and have a good sense of humor, that they don't give a damn whose suitcases are better, but they do. They really do. It's one of the reasons why I roomed with a stupid bastard like Stradlater. At least his suitcases were as good as mine. [...]

[...] Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger's (1951) This novel is often considered to have been the bible of the postwar young, the story of Holden Caulfield, an upper-middle-class adolescent schoolboy just on the edge of losing his presocial and presexual innocence – which he is able to express, like Huckleberry Finn, in his own vivid vernacular and through his own intuitive independence before his revolt collapses. This vivid book was often read as a novel of generational protest, but essentially it is an attempt to discover a lyric religion and language of innocence that can offset social pressures so great that Salinger can only see the world as real, unphony, through the eyes of a teenager. [...]

[...] Stradlater, on the contrary, abuses of his status as a wealthy, handsome and athletic boy, of belonging to the ‘beautiful people', as the nerds say in Jeff Kanew's Revenge of the Nerds (1984). He is so conscious of his superiority that he doesn't even pay attention when Holden caps on him (44). Because Holden is powerless in comparison to Stradlater, his words are equally powerless. Bibliography Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston, New York, London: Back Bay Books, 2001. [...]

[...] When he's dancing with the blond girl at the lounge of the Edmont hotel, he tells her: ‘You're a very good conversationalist [ ] You know that?' But she doesn't even pay attention to what he says and he, ‘let[s] it drop'. There is, then, a big difference between the character's position and the narrator's position. The narrator has authority over the text and over the characters, so the characters can't rebel or ignore him when he makes fun of them, including himself. In fact, the only person who can make fun of Holden is the reader himself. This is not the case with Holden, the character. [...]