Study Guide to The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645422617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Guías de estudio
• Subtopic: Guías de estudio

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, regarded by The New York Times as one of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923. As a 1951 coming-of-age novel, The Catcher in the Rye tells of the crises of a youthful teenage protagonist, Holden Caulfield. Moreover, Salinger’s work is filled with rebellion and angst, which can be seen through themes such as the protection of innocence, death, and insincerity. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Salinger’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO J. D. SALINGER

 

J. D. Salinger (Jerome David Salinger) was born in New York City in 1919 to Sol and Miriam Jillich Salinger (his father was Jewish; his mother, Scotch Irish). He has a sister Doris 8 years his senior. He attended public schools on Manhattan’s upper West Side, the private McBurney School in Manhattan, and then Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1936. His college experience was brief: a summer session at New York University, a short-story writing class at Columbia University taught by Whit Burnett, co-editor of Story, and a short period at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania.

Uninterested in joining his father’s meat importing business, he was writing fiction at least by the time he was twenty (his first published story is dated 1940). Of further biographical note is his military service during World War II, including counter-intelligence training in Devonshire, England (the setting for part of “For Esme-with Love and Squalor”); he also participated in D-Day beach landings and European campaigns. During the post-war period he has lived, in addition to New York, in Tarry-town, N.Y.; Westport, Conn. and Cornish, N.H.

In 1955 he married Claire Douglas; they have a daughter and a son.

Salinger is noted for what has been called a “reverse exhibitionism,” that is, a determination to keep his life private. If he is a recluse, however it seems to have become so by a more gradual process than is usually pointed out (he was, after all, in this teen years, an active student at Valley Forge prep school, participating in several clubs, the dramatic organization, and in the preparation of the academy yearbook as literary editor). Withdrawal may have been the result of disenchantment perhaps with the irritant, nuisance element success can bring, as well as a general seeking after a peaceful existence which was not uncommon to young men who survived the grim years of actual involvement in World War II. In 1950, for example, he was not above visiting (while living at Tarrytown, N. Y.) a short-story class at Sarah Lawrence College, although he remarked afterward, “I enjoyed the day, but it isn’t something I’d ever want to do again.” Since then he has turned down invitations for public appearances (such as participation in the various writers’ conferences which are run regularly in the United States and abroad).

In Cornish, N. H., where he has lived since the fervor of publicity over The Catcher in the Rye, he seems to have stressed in “nuisance values” of success, by putting a high fence around his house. Since this is the case, it seems a wise policy to follow the lead of one of Salinger’s more scrupulous critics (Warren French) who admits in the preface to his book about the author (J. D. Salinger): “I bear no news about Salinger himself-I would consider it impertinent to invade his cherished privacy.”

BACKGROUND AND PUBLICATION OF NINE STORIES

By 1941, when he was 22, Salinger was publishing in well-paying magazines such as Collier’s and Esquire, and he continued to write during World War II. But it was in 1948 that he began to find real recognition, with the publication of three stories which later were to appear in the collection, Nine Stories: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” and “Just Before the War with the Eskimos,” all appearing in the New Yorker, certainly a prestigious sign. In 1949 and 1950 three more stories from his collection were published - “The Laughing Man,” “Down at the Dinghy,” and “For Esme - with Love and Squalor.” The collection itself, of course, was not issued until 1953, since when it has enjoyed lasting popularity without ever reaching the top-selling levels. (The story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” titled My Foolish Heart, was turned into a movie by Samuel Goldwyn studios with Susan Hayward and Dana Andrews. It was a distorted version which Salinger disapproved of highly, a factor which has probably contributed to urge his continuing refusal to allow further screen or television productions of his writings.)

BACKGROUND AND PUBLICATION OF CATCHER IN THE RYE

In the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, while the pieces from Nine Stories were being published separately, Salinger was undoubtedly trying to work into a novel his earlier stories about Holden Caulfield. (In 1946, for instance, a novelette about Holden had been accepted for publication, then was withdrawn by Salinger). The Catcher in the Rye became upon publication in 1951 what might be termed an almost-immediate success. As a midsummer Book-of-the-Month Club selection, for example, it certainly exposed Salinger to a larger audience than he had hitherto enjoyed-if, indeed, “enjoyed” is the proper word, since the degree of popularity was enough to disturb Salinger, who directed that a large photograph of his face be removed from the third and subsequent issuings of the book. He remarked later to a friend that “I feel tremendously relieved that the season for success for The Catcher in the Rye is nearly over. I enjoyed a small part of it, but most of it I found hectic and professionally and personally demoralizing.” Reviews of the novel were mixed, from out-and-out approval to questions about Salinger’s attitudes, the colloquial style, the focus on an adolescent boy, and, of course, the issue which has since attracted attention-whether the book was fit for young readers. Thus The Catcher in the Rye, especially since issuance as a paperback in 1953, has been, curiously, both stipulated for and banned from high school and college reading lists (the foundation for, or lack of foundation for, such controversy is explored in the following pages of detailed analysis of the novel).

LIST OF SALINGER’S WORKS

The Catcher in the Rye, 1951; Nine Stories, 1953; Franny and Zooey, 1961; Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, 1963. (As indicated above, all subsequent works listed after The Catcher in the Rye are short stories, most of them published prior to collective issuance.)

A BRIEF LOOK AT SALINGER’S THEMES AND ATTITUDES

Following are some of the issues pertinent to any detailed analysis of Salinger’s work, issues which are treated in the “Comments” below as well as in the short summary of what Salinger’s critics have had to say about his writings: (a) His protagonists are often intelligent, sensitive, and very aware adolescents, or adults who, in either case, seek their own identity in relation to an external world with which they find themselves more or less at variance. (b) Alienation or disenchantment with the so-called “adult” world figures largely in Salinger’s writings, often emphasized by rather “average” characters (parents, teachers, marriage partners, etc.) who interrelate with the troubled protagonist. (c) A definition of the “adult” world is sometimes sought or offered-it may be viewed as commercialized, materialistic, phony, ugly, grotesque-all suggestive of reasons for the sensitive protagonist to retreat from it, in reality or symbolically (for example, through madness, or suicide, or simply by introversion and fantasy). (d) Salinger is very concerned with the rather ancient question of innocence and experience in human lives, and how the life experience which is inevitable may best be realized instrue spiritual growth, instead of producing, say, a tough cynicism (such as that of Eloise in “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” or of young Selena and Eric in “Before the War with the Eskimos”). (e) Sometimes true “love” of humanity seems to be the solution offered, as in “Teddy”. (f) Salinger’s style includes a rather inspired use of detail - he can characterize in an instant’s phrase - and a good deal of 20th-century slang, vocabulary of adolescents, colloquialisms.

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

INTRODUCTION

 

ACCLAIM

With the publication of The Catcher in the Rye in 1951, J. D. Salinger gained an almost immediate acceptance as being among the most significant post-World War II American novelists. Widespread critical acclaim, not without an element of protest, established the thirty-two-year-old novelist’s reputation, and shortly thereafter his work became assigned reading for a majority of high school and college English courses. The esteem felt for him on campus and his appeal to the younger intellectual are quite understandable, for Salinger had begun the novel a full ten years before and had actually been writing for seventeen years. The Catcher in the Rye and the short stories that preceded it, therefore, appeal directly to youth, which the young author so imaginatively recreates.

It should not be thought that this story of the crises of a youthful protagonist was unique in American fiction, for Huckleberry Finn is certainly a prototype of Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. Like Huck Finn, the deeply disturbed Holden Caulfield became a legendary figure, and his acute adolescent awareness became synonymous with the sensitivity of a great many young Americans.

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

CHAPTERS 1-5

CHAPTERS 1 AND 2

First Person

An element of prime importance to the effect that this novel has on the reader is the fact that it is told in the first person. The use of this method of telling a story lends verisimilitude to the details while, at the same time, the reader is made to feel that he knows more about what is happening than does the narrator. A major reason for the fact that Huckleberry Finn is the only literary sequel in history that surpasses its antecedent is that Huck was allowed to tell his own story, while Tom Sawyer’s adventures were related by an adult. The result was that in Tom Sawyer, the author constantly interposes himself between Tom and the reader. We are told, instead of being allowed to discover for ourselves, what emotions it was intended that we feel in a given situation. We never really get to know Tom because we see him through the eyes of another person; when we read Huckleberry Finn, it is almost as though we are living through his experiences ourselves.

The same is true in the case of Holden Caulfield. Because he is allowed to relate his own story in and on his own terms, we feel an empathy for him that could not have been otherwise achieved. The reader is granted an introspective view of the story; at the same time, because his background is not the same as Holden’s, the reader retains his objectivity. Thus, he learns more about Holden than Holden himself knows.

Autobiography

A pitfall to be avoided is the conclusion that since many of the details about a fictional character agree with actual aspects of the author, the story is an autobiography. It is true that Pencey Prep reminds us of Valley Forge Military Academy-in Pennsylvania-which Salinger attended; it is true that Holden mentions an older brother who is a writer (who seems similar to Salinger himself) and to whom Holden always refers by his initials-D.B., not J.D.; there are, no doubt, many other characters and events that Salinger drew from his own life. It does not, however, necessarily follow that ...