Further Insights: J.D. Salinger

(note: any post made on a novel is intended for those who are reading along at the same pace or for a comparison of opinions after reading. If you are sensitive to plot spoilers

please do not read)

After doing a little research on J.D. Salinger I have gained a little insight on Holden Caulfield's personality. It's easy to see how he holds such bitterness towards New York and the world of acting. Salinger grew up in Manhattan and had many brushes with the entertainment industry, none too pleasant. Although it seems as if Salinger has a lot of appreciation for movies (not films). He may be a harsh critic, explaining Holden's bitterness (totally just me guessing). It is also ironic to review his (Salinger) inability to commit to one religious worldview, noting how Holden seems so at unease with the world around him.

Im including a piece that I got on wikipedia on Salinger as a comparison to my view on the Catcher in the Rye:

"In a contributor's note Salinger gave to Harper's Magazine in 1946, he wrote: "I almost always write about very young people", a statement which has been referred to as hiscredo.^[100] Adolescents are featured or appear in all of Salinger's work, from his first published short story, "The Young Folks", to The Catcher in the Rye and his Glass familystories. In 1961, the critic Alfred Kazin explained that Salinger's choice of teenagers as a subject matter was one reason for his appeal to young readers, but another was "a consciousness [among youths] that he speaks for them and virtually to them, in a language that is peculiarly honest and their own, with a vision of things that capture their most secret judgments of the world."^[101] Salinger's language, especially his energetic, realistically sparse dialogue, was revolutionary at the time his first stories were published, and was seen by several critics as "the most distinguishing thing" about his work.^[102]

Salinger identified closely with his characters,^[79] and used techniques such as interior monologue, letters, and extended telephone calls to display his gift for dialogue. Such style elements also "[gave] him the illusion of having, as it were, delivered his characters' destinies into their own keeping."^[103] Recurring themes in Salinger's stories also connect to the ideas of innocence and adolescence, including the "corrupting influence of Hollywood and the world at large",^[104] the disconnect between teenagers and "phony" adults,^[104] and the perceptive, precocious intelligence of children.^[23]

Contemporary critics discuss a clear progression over the course of Salinger's published work, as evidenced by the increasingly negative reviews received by each of his three post-Catcher story collections.^[99][105] Ian Hamilton adheres to this view, arguing that while Salinger's early stories for the "slicks" boasted "tight, energetic" dialogue, they had also been formulaic and sentimental. It took the standards of The New Yorker editors, among them William Shawn, to refine his writing into the "spare, teasingly mysterious, withheld" qualities of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", The Catcher in the Rye, and his stories of the early 1950s.^[106] By the late 1950s, as Salinger became more reclusive and involved in religious study, Hamilton notes that his stories became longer, less plot-driven, and increasingly filled with digression and parenthetical remark"

My final opinion on the Catcher in the Rye, before I leave it behind is....there were a few insights that i appreciated as far as how the world looked to Holden Caulfield, thoughts that I had not consciously strung together quite as tightly as he had. I enjoyed the literary style, it was an amazingly cohesive read, BUT on the downside I'm trying to stay away from bitter modern American fiction (I've been chuck palahniuk'd out)(and yes i consider something from 1951 still modern). I'm glad I read it, but probably will not revisit any other of his writing for a few years until I'm all european fiction'd out.