J. D. Salinger

J. D. Salinger was an influential twentieth-century American writer most famous for his novel. He is considered of immense influence though his corpus of works is small. He skyrocketed to literary fame with his most famous novel, The Catcher in the Rye. Through this work, he changed the course of post-World War II American literature. He was not only a famous novelist, but he wrote short stories as well, which gave him great fame. His works were a critical and economical success.

Salinger was a reclusive person and didn’t like to be disturbed by people. For this reason, he didn’t appear in public and avoided contact with the media. His reclusiveness not only controlled his personal life but literary life as well. After his death, his son claimed that he kept writing for more than fifty years without publishing the works he produced. He was against rewriting and editing of the works he has written. This can be seen as the probable reason for not publishing his works. He had an interest in Zen Buddhism, and its influences are seen in his works. This interest is mainly a result of the interest of writers in Zen philosophy.

He published short stories in Story magazine before his famous novel came to be published. He won critical acclaim through the main character in Catcher in the Rye, who rebelled against the ‘phony’ world. This work is part of the tradition of great works like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn etc.

He explored the themes of enlightenment, spirituality, and coming of age in his works. Other themes that he has incorporated in his works are alienation, lack of meaningful relationships, etc. An interesting fact about his most famous work is its preparation during his participation in the war.

Salinger had a personal relationship with Hemingway since the days of World War II but was more influenced by Fitzgerald. His works are free of dogma and have a humane spirituality. His short stories promote religious pluralism, and it is refreshing because they don’t promote sentimentalism. He has an ear for dialogue, which he has inherited from Hemingway and Fitzgerald. This preference for dialogue is seen in his famous short stories. He participated in World War II, and its memories haunted him throughout his life, his works carrying the traces of the unpleasant memories.

Salinger’s personality remains veiled and mystified because of his reclusiveness. He enjoyed control of his privacy through many controversial steps that he took. He even sued publishers and biographers for sharing material related to him.

A Short Biography of J. D. Salinger

Jerome David Salinger was born on January 1st, 1919, in Manhattan, New York. His father, Sol Salinger, belonged to a Jewish family of Lithuanian descent. His mother, Marie, was a Christian of mixed European descent, who later believed to be half-Jewish after marrying Sol. His mother changed her name to Miriam, after marrying his father. His father had worked as Rabbi at the local congregation in Louisville, Kentucky. Jerome had one sibling, Doris, his elder sister.

During their stay at Manhattan, Salinger attended public schools there. When they moved to Park Avenue, he was enrolled at the McBurney School. He couldn’t fit well there and found himself in great discomfort. He used to call himself Jerry while his family called him Sonny. During his time there, he wrote for the school magazine and became part of the fencing team. He also participated as an actor in plays.

He was then enrolled at Forge Military Academy, Wayne, Pennsylvania. There he remained the literary editor of the class yearbook and was an active member of various societies. Documents about him at Forge reveal that he was a ‘mediocre’ student, and his IQ was slightly above average. He was enrolled at New York University in 1936. He soon dropped out from there.

He was urged by his father to join his meat business. He willingly joined and worked in Austria and Poland. Though he joined the business willingly, he developed a disgust for the slaughtering business. This had an influence on his vegetarianism later. He left Austria a month before it was annexed by Nazi Germany. On his return to the US, he joined Ursinus College, Collegeville, Pennsylvania. He contributed his part to the magazine there. He dropped out of there after spending a semester there.

His golden time came when he was enrolled at a writing class at Columbia University School of General Studies. There the editor of the Story magazine, Whit Burnett, taught this course. Salinger came to his notice in the second semester due to his skill in writing short stories. His debut short story was published in Story magazine in the March-April issue. Burnett had a special interest in him because of his skills, and he remained his mentor for several years.

He came to a relationship with Eugene O’Neill’s daughter in 1942. This ended soon when she married the famous actor Charlie Chaplin. This year he submitted three short stories to the New Yorker, all of which were rejected. He worked on a cruise as a performer. He was drafted into the military in 1942, and he participated in several key battles.

During his stay in Europe during the war, he managed to contact Hemingway through the mail, and this proved a long-lasting contact. He discussed his literary plans with Hemingway and was impressed by his friendliness and modesty. He also remained part of the counterintelligence team and investigated many prisoners.

He went into trauma due to his war experiences and was hospitalized in 1945. He married Sylvia Welter in Germany, but this relationship broke soon, and they parted after eight months. His first collection of short stories was published by the Lippincott Imprint of Story magazine. He was influenced by Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, and this influence remained on his personality and his literary works throughout his life.

He wrote his only novel during the 1940s, and it was published in 1951 by Little Brown and Company. With this novel came much fame to him, and for this reason, he withdrew from public and became a recluse. He bought a house in Cornish, New Hampshire, and had a little public appearance. He married for the second time to Claire Douglas from whom he had two children Margaret and Matthew. He separated from this wife soon and had one more marriage and several other affairs.

He died in Cornish, New Hampshire, due to natural reasons on January 27th, 2010.

J. D. Salinger’s Writing Style

Salinger has a unique narrative style, and through it, he exposes various aspects of the character. His narration in fictional works is characterized by third-person narrative and dialogue form. Through this dialogic description, the reader is able to grasp the relationship between the characters. He describes the physical actions of the characters through the third-person narrative. This is not only a description but a visualization. In his novel The Catcher in the Rye, he uses detailed descriptions. There is a division into small paragraphs that focus on his opinion more than the actual happenings.

He bluntly criticizes many things that he didn’t like. There is a brutal honesty and profanity in his works, which is a resistance against the ‘phony’ world. There is an incorporation of depression, the awkwardness that a teenager faces, humour, and loneliness in his works. He has a deep understanding of things around him, and this he expresses in the intricate details that he gives in his works. He has a convincing ability, which makes the reader feel unified with the characters, though his characters’ perspective is often contrary to the opinion held by the majority.

Psychological Structure

His works are a depiction of a psychological conflict that is faced by the characters when they are coming of age. An example is from The Catcher in the Rye, where the protagonist expresses his disgust for the football teams that have a match in the ground. This shows the character’s disapproval of human aggression, which needs to be expressed, and in the game, it is done by the match between two teams. There are verbal echoes that represent the adults’ efforts to put an end to the idyllic life of the teenagers.

There are several fears expressed which mainly include the problems nearing adulthood. These are sex, responsibilities, senescence, death, etc. There is a hypersensitivity shown towards the insensitivity and exploitations of the post-pubescent world. Some critics refer to the neurosis of Holden, which is key to the description of his perspective and perception of things. The suggestive imagery and scene construction in The Catcher suggests alienation, aggression, regression, etc. which are the psychological issues faced by Holden.  

There is a subtle but coherent psychological pattern taking shape as the protagonist develops.

The Love Ethic

Holden Caulfield is one of the few literary characters which have aroused imitation, controversy, and devotion at a single time. There is the use of his own vernacular by this character. The world which he sees is fragmented, distorted, and absurd. This character has precedents in Salinger’s early stories. His protagonists’ life is in strict accordance with ethical standards and lives an indifferent life. Holden’s gestures are quixotic, and his love stance is transcendent. Holden doesn’t like moves and compares work there to prostitution. In contrast, he shows reverence for nuns, which show Salinger’s inclinations towards his past as his father was a Rabbi.

He describes the sophisticated talk going on in nightclubs and bars and looks at it with contempt. Through the character of Mr Antolini, he has called it a ‘fall.’ But the same person is petting Holden when he wakes up. He promotes a sense of anti-vulgarity and anti-phoniness by erasing all the base words that are written on street walls or bathrooms. The novel promotes the idea that there is no fulfilment in the adult world, and for this reason, the protagonist intends to prevent adolescents from stepping into this world. 

It is a quest to preserve innocence. In his short stories, Salinger has worked on the same theme to keep emotional innocence preserved and intact. His second collection of short stories, Nine Stories, promotes the same idea where the protagonist of the first story tells the readers that he has only loved his mother.

Keeping it in the Family: The Novellas

Salinger’s novellas have received much less critical attention, and the main reason cited for it is their hopeless prolixity. There is criticism on them for being critical of the culture which made them. In these works, he has attempted to break through the unavoidable deceits of fiction. In his initial novellas, there are failed attempts of self-realization shown. For this purpose, diametrically opposed methods are used. He has used an alternative perspective in these works. There is a reversal of romance and domesticity, which is done to show their absence, exhibiting farce, or black comedy.

In these novellas, a sensitivity towards stereotype and social cliché is shown. In the story Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes, there is conformity shown to the typical roles. Speech is used as a part of psychological tactics, and the struggle for supremacy is shown through it. There are veiled sexual threats in the letters that are exchanged between various characters. In Salinger’s longer works of the late fifties, there are psychoanalytical subtleties. Some critics refer to Salinger as an amateur psychologist for this reason.    

Rhetoric, Sanity, and the Cold War

Holden Caulfield’s speech in The Catcher in the Rye is a reflection of the contradictions and pressures in the cold war society. The speaker of the novel is proscriptive, where the rhetorical style is essay-like. There is an integration of specific examples, generalizations, and consequent rules. 

There are two drives prevalent in Caulfield; drive to control the environment by making rules, and by making oneself a person whose life is governed by rules. Thus there is an attempt to make oneself both the object and subject. Thus, as a result, conflict is created, which leads to a closed alley where there is no option left for the protagonist.

In Caulfield’s character, the characters of Huck and Jim from Huckleberry Finn are combined. This character longs for freedom and honesty in a world which is in firm control of deceit and slavery. Thus it is the reflection of the tensions developing in post-war America. It was a post-war society that was taken by anti-communist propaganda, and practical steps and these happenings are shown through phonies in this novel. There was a widespread quest to know about duplicity in people, and this influenced the young protagonist of the novel. 

Language became the main target of this scavenging mission, and for this reason, there is often disbelief shown for an apparent form of talk in The Catcher in the Rye.

Linked Mysteries

Salinger’s Nine Stories are the topic of main interest for critics since publication. There are various and contradictory responses to them since, despite being the focus of critics for more than five decades. These stories don’t follow any specific logical pattern, and thus the individual works in this collection can’t be linked. There are dissimilarities in their voice, structure, subject, symbolism, character, milieu, and other literary features that are sources for interpretation. 

There is no such pattern yet discovered that can help understand critics the cohesive pattern of these stores. Perhaps this is the reason that Nine Stories attracts much readership than his other short fictional works. 

There is discontinuity though there are deceptive surface similarities. The epigraph to these stories is another addition to the mystery of this collection. The initial interpretative challenge for the readers comes from the title of the collection, which is simply a statement of the fact that these are nine stories. Through the Zen Kaon epigraph, the intellectual and rational solution is defied for the transcendental option. 

If seen from the Zen perspective, these stories are a road leading from spiritual death to spiritual enlightenment (satori). The reason that can be cited for it is the uselessness of any pattern in Zen spirituality.

There are some connections, incremental suggestions, and illuminating suggestions, which are the suggestion of a more subtle arrangement. The individual titles of stories refer to stories within stories and are in sharp contrast with the main title. Though stories are connected, some with the place, others with conjoined narratives, repetitive language, etc. but they don’t make an overall pattern.

Post War American Fable

Salinger’s work, The Catcher in the Rye, is considered one of the most significant fictional works which were published after World War II. Its plotlines have been used by three other novelists in their famous works. It transcends the cultural gap between generations, and for this reason, it is an enduring work. Through this work, exemplars were set by the author, and double lives are presented as cultural statements. This novel, through the protagonist, shows disapproval of the postwar adult American world.

There are various definitions of success, ranging from education to the film industry. The craziness of the narrator is enhanced by the closing that happens at the same time and place where it begins. This novel incorporates the maturation of the generation that debates all the ideas that preoccupy their mind. This novel carries the Adamic fictional tradition, which prioritizes morality and solitary experience over the waiting world.