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摘 要

《麦田里的守望者》是美国作家J. D. 塞林格的一部长篇小说，故事情节极为简单，仅仅描述了主人公霍尔顿在纽约三天的流浪生活，却深刻地展现了青少年茫然无措的心路成长历程。作者通过霍尔顿这一形象向读者展示了二战后美国青少年物质生活的丰富与精神生活的匮乏之间的矛盾，这一矛盾在霍尔顿身上尤为明显。

该小说作为一部优秀的成长小说始终带给读者精神上的成长感悟。虽然受到褒贬不一的评价，但其读者却与日俱增，时至今日仍高居于美国畅销书的榜首。

在总结前人的研究基础上，本文通过分析主人公霍尔顿成长过程中迷惘、反叛、追寻以及接受成长，最终达到顿悟的经历来展现他的精神之旅，从而得出人作为社会活动的主体，应该学会如何适应社会，而不是选择逃避现实的结论。

关键词：赛林格 麦田里的守望者 矛盾 反叛 顿悟

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements........................................................................................................i

Abstract (English)........................................................................................................ii

Abstract (Chinese)......................................................................................................iii

1. Introduction.................................................................................................................................1

1.1 Life and literary career of J. D. Salinger................................................................................1

1.2 A brief introduction of The Catcher in the Rye......................................................................2

2. Literature Review........................................................................................................................3

1. Holden’s Painful Growth...........................................................................................................5

3.1 Anxiety...................................................................................................................................5

3.2 Rebellions..............................................................................................................................6

3.3 Escapes..................................................................................................................................7

3.4 Fantasies................................................................................................................................8

4. Holden’s Enlightenment............................................................................................................10

4.1 Groping for brightness in the darkness................................................................................10

4.2 Holden’s epiphanies.............................................................................................................10

4.3 Inspiration for the modern youth.........................................................................................12

5. Conclusion..................................................................................................................................13

Works Cited...................................................................................................................................14

1. Introduction

1.1 Life and literature career of J. D. Salinger

Jerome David Salinger, generally referred to as J. D. Salinger, a famous American novelist and short story writer, is best known for his masterpiece The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

J. D. Salinger was born on January 1, 1919 and grew up in a fashionable apartment district of Manhattan, New York. He was the son of a prosperous Jewish importer of Kosher cheese and his Scotch-Irish wife. After restless studies in prep school, he was sent to Valley Forge Military Academy (1934 - 1936), where he edited Cross Sabres. His friends from this period remember his sarcastic wit. From 1936 to 1938 he studied at New York University and Ursinus College. In 1939 Salinger took a class in short story writing at Columbia University under Whit Burnett, founder-editor of the Story magazine. From 1940 to1941, Salinger released four stories in some popular magazines. During World War II he was drafted into the 4^th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army and was involved in the invasion of Normandy. Salinger’s comrades considered him to be every brave and a genuine hero. During the first months in Europe, Salinger managed to write stories and in Paris he met Ernest Hemingway. Salinger was also involved in one of the bloodiest episodes of the war in hurtgenwald, a futile battle, where he witnessed the horrors of war. In 1946, Salinger returned to New York and continued his writing career.

Salinger began writing short stories while in secondary school and published several stories in the early 1940s before serving in World War II. Salinger’s early short stories appeared in such magazines as Story, Esquire, Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s and the New Yorker. Salinger made his literary debut of Holden Caulfield in a 1946 issue of Collier’s in an article entitled “I’m Crazy”. This heralded his world-famous novel The Catcher in the Rye. In 1948 he published the critically acclaimed story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” in The New Yorker, which became home to much of his subsequent work. In 1951, The Catcher in the Rye came into the world and became one of the most popular novels of the latter half of the twentieth century.

After The Catcher in the Rye was published, Salinger became reclusive, publishing work less frequently. He followed The Catcher in the Rye with a short story collection, Nine Stories (1953), a collection of a novella and a short story, Franny and Zooey (1961), and a collection of two novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). His last published work, a novella entitled “Hapworth 16, 1924”, appeared in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965. Salinger died of natural causes on January 27, 2010, at this home in Cornish, New Hampshire, at the age of 91, which brought on a renewed interest in his life and his works.

1.2 A Brief introduction of The Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye is originally published for adults. It has become popular with adolescent readers since then for its themes of teenage confusion, anxiety, alienation, language, and rebellion. The Catcher in the Rye tells the story of a sixteen-year-old high school boy who is brought up in decadent New York. The boy called Holden Caulfield is expelled from school because of his poor study. He is reluctant to go back home for the fear that his parents will know his exclusion from school. So he decides to stay in a hotel of New York where he meets different kinds of people, including pimps, prostitutes and "queers". Gradually he finds that actually the world is a "phony" one. He creeps up on seeing his lovely little sister Phoebe, but he is sickened by her talking about their father "killing" him and sneaks away from home. Then he goes to see his teacher, Mr. Antolini, only to find that his ever respectable teacher is a homosexual. He makes up his mind to go west and spends the rest of his life there. When he goes to say goodbye to Phoebe, unexpectedly, she wants to leave together with him. Out of his love for her, he gives up his dream, puts an end to his three-day adventure in New York and finally goes home. Soon he feels ill and goes to live in a psychiatric ward in California, where he recounts his painful memory. This novel has been translated into almost all of the world's major languages. His depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence in the protagonist Holden Caulfield is influential, especially among adolescent readers. The novel's protagonist and antihero, Holden Caulfield, has become an icon for teenage rebellion. The novel is included on Time’s 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923, and it is named by Modern Library. It has been frequently challenged in the United States and other countries for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and teenage anxiety. It also deals with complex issues of identity, belonging, connection, and alienation. The novel remains widely read and controversial, selling around 250,000 copies a year with total number of more than 65 million.

1. Literature Review

The Catcher in the Rye, which is sometimes called “Modern Classic” of American literature in the 20^th century, renders a panoramic picture of an adolescent’s world, in which J. D. Salinger delicately traces Holden’s odyssey from a physically and spiritually embittered adolescent through the psychologically full-fledged adulthood to his eventual initiation into the society. Since its publication, The Catcher in the Rye has caught a lot of critical attention, varying from traditional criticism to various post-modernist views, and received diverse interpretations. Widespread successful criticism, together with some elements of protest, established the thirty-two-year-old novelist’s reputation. It is around the leading character Holden Caulfield that the most heated debates revolve, pitting the Holden lovers in one corner against the Holden haters in the other, due to Holden as one of the earliest anti-heroes in American literature.

In the early years, The Catcher in the Rye attracted critics’ attention for its themes of teenage confusion, angst, sexuality, alienation, rebellion, growing up, etc. David L. Stevenson (1957) thought that the novel was Salinger’s most ambitious presentation of aspects of contemporary alienation. Charlotte Alexander regarded the novel as a quest story, and she argued, “It is clear that J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye belongs to an ancient and honorable narrative tradition, perhaps the most profound in western fiction... It is, of course, the tradition of the Quest.” (Alexander, 1997: 88) Some critics also probed into the ending of the novel. Most considered The Catcher in the Rye to be a tragedy. John Aldrige (1956) wrote that in the end, Holden remained what he was in the beginning — cynical, defiant, and blind. Some other critics adopted a more optimistic view of the conclusion. Paul Alexander (2001) remarked, “Holden knows that things won’t remain the same; they are dissolving, and he can’t allow himself to reconcile with it. Holden doesn’t have the knowledge to trace his breakdown or the mental clarity to define it, for all he knows is that a large avalanche of disintegration is occurring around him.”(Alexander, 2001: 108) The Catcher in the Rye was not popular to most Chinese readers until 1983. Some scholars paid attention to the theme of growing up. Bing Yuping (2004) analyzed Holden’s rebellion and final initiation maturity. Guo Jia (2002) analyzed Holden’s initiation characteristics after his escape from the phony world. Li Jing (1999) concentrated on the theme of rebellion by examining the characters and words of the novel. Shang Xiaojin (2001) analyzed Holden’s rebellion against the mainstream culture and claimed Holden’s rebellion is his way of escape. After making comprehensive comments on the language, character descriptions and the historical context of this novel, Li Zhengrong (1997) thought that a hypocritical, degenerated and cruel American society was exposed and criticized by the author. Yang Xiaoping (2002) pointed out that the contents of this book were a reflection of the times. Yu Jianhua (1999) criticized the phony, hypocritical, degrading and depressing American society in his works.

1. Holden’s Painful Growth

This chapter will dwell on some important phases to present Holden’s initiation. Holden is naive at the beginning. When he feels he can’t endure the phony school any more, the outside world has become a temptation to him though the future remains problematic, so he chooses to escape into New York, which further disillusions Holden and reinforces his conviction that the world is full of phonies. He grows up and gains new knowledge of himself and society.

3.1 Anxiety

Psychologically speaking, the teenage years stand out as life’s most complicated and tortured period. It has been said that teenagers’ behaviors actually resemble schizophrenia. Certainly, this is one period of life in which abnormal behavior is common rather than exceptional. In the course of growing, the first stage the youth pass through is childhood. In this period, children accept positive instillation, such as fairy tales, so they believe the sun is shining, the flower is in blossom, the human nature is kind and the prince and princess will stay together. But with the time, they find suddenly the family, the school, and society are different from what they should expect. The corruption and vulgarity are glutted with the world. They feel cheated. They are frustrated with their circumstance and generate a sense of alienation and despair. They endeavor to grow up to pass through this stage, but paradoxically want to remain the same instead of changing. Recognizing their involvement in the sullied world and questing for a more meaningful existence, they express their dislikes in offensive language and misbehavior. Then they have been regarded primarily as a disturbed youth even though often talk sense.

From the opening paragraph of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden makes it clear that he sees himself as insane: “I'll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.” (Salinger, 1951: 34) Whenever he is accused of not growing up, Holden pleads insanity because he believes that dissatisfaction is a far more natural response to the state of modern society than obliging acceptance. He resists the movement and change, because those people are phony and foolish. Only children possess the uninhibited spontaneity that Holden believes is an honest expression of human nature. In Holden’s eyes, childhood represents the purity of instinct, while adulthood marks a confusion of motive. Holden’s anxiety of childhood is rooted in his struggles between the dream of innocence and the fact of maturity.

Anxiety is an unpleasurable affection in which the individual experiences a feeling of danger whose cause is unconscious. Unlike hunger or thirst, which builds and dissipates in the immediate present, anxiety is the sort of feeling that sneaks up on people from the day after tomorrow.

3.2 Rebellions

Since the book was published in 1951, Holden has become an icon for teenage rebellion. His rebellion can be found from his distinctive dress-up, recalcitrant behavior and vulgar language.

First, Holden’s rebellion is shown through his dress-up. Holden likes wearing a red hunting hat, which becomes inseparable from his image. It is not part of the fashion at the time, but Holden likes it very much. He wears it in a different way, “The way I wore it, I swung the old peak way around to the back--very corny, I’ll admit, but I liked it that way. I looked good in it that way.” (Ibid, 67) The cheap and simple red hunting hat, with no significance to anyone else but him, has become a symbol of Holden’s rebellion against Conformity. It stands for his uniqueness and individuality, and shows that Holden desires to be different from everyone around him.

Second, Holden’s rebellion is shown in his behavior. He resents the adult world and rejects all materialistic value and success. He rebels against family and class expectations. He despises the compromises, loss of innocence, absence of integrity, and loss of authenticity in the grown-up world. He smokes heavily so that he is out of shape. He drinks a lot of alcohols, even though he is under the age of law allowance. He likes lying and confesses, “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life.” (Ibid, 121) It seems that he is abandoning himself and becomes a vicious irreclaimable boy, but in fact, he is showing his rebellion against the phoniness around him.

Third, Holden’s rebellion is shown in his language. Holden misused lots of vocabulary purposely. When he first mentions something he likes, Holden often uses “this” such as “this hat”, “this guy Ossenburger”, “this one story”, “this very cute girl”, etc. According to English grammar, an indefinite article is often used instead of “this” when first mentioning something. Holden purposely violates the grammar to show his individuality. There are lots of profanity and vulgarity in his language, for example, he has used 350 “damns” and “god damns”. Holden’s language is a deliberate rebellion against the standard language and conventional culture.

3.3 Escapes

Holden is strongly dissatisfied with the current world. In his eyes, the adult world is commercialized, materialistic, ugly and absurd. He suffers from the evils, bitterness, estrangement and phoniness of society. He cannot accept the human condition as what it is, and wants to pursue a more significant life. As a boy of only sixteen years old, his most “effective” method to show his rebellion and disaffection is to escape, or to run away. He continuously escapes from one private prep school to another, then from Pencey Prep to New York City, in which he wanders among several places and finally fantasizes escape from New York City to an anonymous place in the west. He is always “on the road”. When Phoebe reveals her plan to go with him, Holden accepts the futility of his escape plan and goes home.

Holden sees all the people around him are phonies. In order to avoid becoming a phony, Holden begins his desperate escapes. Pencey Prep is the first place he decides to escape from. Holden cannot find any warmth, guidance or love there but indifference, pretense and coldness: self-centered classmates like Ackley and Stradlater, and unreasonable teachers like Spencer.

Holden runs away from the school and escapes to New York in search of some kind of sustenance. New York is the city of his childhood, and of Phoebe’s. He would like to find truth and comfort there. But again what he sees is not what he expects to see. If the world of Pencey is a muted purgatory, the world of New York is an insistent hell. Shortly after Holden leaves Pencey Prep, he checks into the Edmont Hotel. This is where Holden’s turmoil begins. Holden spends the following evening in this hotel which “was full of perverts and morons. There were screwballs all over the place.”(Ibid, 156) His situation only deteriorates from this point on as the more he looks around this world, the more depressing life seems. Through the encounters with different kind of people. Holden tastes the bitters of life, a life outside the fences of prep schools, a life that is more real, yet even more tough and harsh. Cab drivers, the prostitute Sunny and her pimp Maurice, the piano player old Ernie, Carl Luce, the expert on sex, all teach Holden a lesson. Around every corner Holden sees evil. He sees a world which appears completely immoral and unscrupulous, he claims, “seldom yields any occasions of peace, charity or even genuine merriment.” (Ibid, 178) Holden is surrounded by what he views as drunks, perverts, morons and screwballs. No matter where he runs to, he cannot permanently escape from the real society.

3.4 Fantasies

Holden can’t find an idealistic place that belongs to his own in the world. To the evil real world, he can neither save it nor live in it as it is, so he retreats into fantasies, into imaginations, which reflect his failure in the real world.

When Phoebe asks him to name something that he would like to be when he grows up, he states that he would like to follow a poem by Robert Burns: If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye and become a catcher in the rye. Holden weaves a fantasy image of himself standing at the edge of a crazy cliff near a field of rye. When children playing a game in the rye above the cliff begin to fall off it, he will try to catch them.

“I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around --- nobody big, I mean --- except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff --- I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going. I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all clay. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing 1’d really like to be.” (Ibid, 218)

Holden invents a fantasy that adulthood is a world of superficiality and hypocrisy, while childhood is a world of innocence, curiosity, and honesty. Nothing reveals his image of these two worlds better than his fantasy about the catcher in the rye. He imagines childhood as an idyllic field of rye in which children romp and play. Adulthood, for the children of this world, is equivalent to death一a fatal fall over the edge of a cliff. Holden wants to stop children from losing their innocence and becoming an adult, and he takes pleasure in the attempted thwarting of maturation. He sees himself in a world with no adults and he is the only “big” person. His job is to stand at the end of this great field of rye at the edge of a cliff and to save thousands of small children from falling into the nearby abyss, into which he has already fallen, or is falling into at this very moment.

Except the fantasy --- to be the catcher in the rye, Holden makes up another fantasy for his future. After his visit to Mr. Antolini, he is so repulsed by the phoniness around him that he feels despaired of communicating and contacting with others. He decides to go out West and to be a deaf-mute.

Holden has no place to go and he is totally let down by the entire world. He longs for the unspoiled and simple life in the West. He wants to go and be a deaf-mute so as to escape all the phonies and hypocrites of everyday life. However, it is only his nice childish wish. When Phoebe tells him that she wants to go along with him, he denies her of this because of his growing responsibility. He told her, “I’m not going away anywhere. I changed my mind.” (Ibid, 256) So the readers can see that Holden’s fantasies exist only in his imagination and have no practical solution to his difficult and torturous situation he faces in the adult world.

1. Holden’s Enlightenment

4.1 Groping for brightness in the darkness

Gu Cheng’s poem may be used to explain the paradox of Holden’s rebellion. In Gu Cheng’s famous two-lined poem A Generation: “The night gives me black eyes, but I use it to look for light.” It concisely shows that the “dark eyes” in pursuit of “light” in the “darkness” are trying to change the situation and objective subject to the intended to change the situation of tragedy. “Black eyes” have intentions to rebel the darkness, but doomed to experience this dilemma to usher in brightness. This is an intertwined ideal and the reality be inextricably involved a complex. When Holden expresses rebellion to his real life with his “Beat Generation” words and deeds, he is in the pain interweaving between this spirit yearning and reality together. He always felt the inconsistency between their noble purpose and decaying means and vulgar reality. The gap between the purpose and means makes his heart hurt. Thus, Holden’s rebellion on the social surrounding has the meaning of paradox and irony. Besides his opposing to “The Beat Generation” makes him more isolated, to a certain extent, it has strengthened his tendency to resist. For example, Holden hates the film, but he talks about films with great familiarity. He not only often watches some boring movies, even some of his imagination is also a typical mode of Hollywood movie. When he criticized the hypocrisy of others, he himself also speaks bullshit. As the analysis above, Holden’s rebellious way has a dual meaning: it is a rebellion to corruption and also a kind of blame for corruption.

4.2 Holden’s epiphanies

Holden’s epiphany occurs after spotting another “fuck you” etched in the serene Egyptian tomb. Before going out West, Holden decides to say last good-bye to Phoebe. For him, museums represent stability, because “the best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was ... Nobody’d be different.” (Ibid, 239) Holden feels that certain things should just stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone. But when Holden stands in a tomb in the museum and views another “Fuck you” scrawled under the glass in red crayon, he narrates, “That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any.” (Ibid, 247)

Holden has another epiphany while watching Phoebe ride the carousel. His emotional outpouring at the merry-go-round further sustains his prior reasoning that he can’t stop maturation.

“All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she’d fall off the god dam horse, but I didn’t say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it’s bad if you say anything to them.” (Ibid, 268)

His acceptance of Phoebe’s need to “grab for the gold ring” indicates that he sees her as a maturing individual who must be allowed to live her own life and take her own risks. That’s a step forward from believing that he must be their protector. As Phoebe goes toward the ride for another time, it starts raining and at that moment Holden “felt so damn happy”. Baptized by the down pouring rain, Holden is purified and redeemed. Although he hasn’t become a true adult, he seems ready to surrender to the inevitability of growing up, which means Holden’s own maturation has begun.

The last epiphany appears at the end of the novel. Holden has a mental breakdown and he admits in hospital, “I sort of miss everybody I told you about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that god dam Maurice. It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” (Ibid, 288) Stradlater, Ackley and the pimp Maurice represent those people whom Holden hates most, but now he doesn’t hate them any more. By Holden acknowledging he misses all the people and children he has met throughout the novel, the reader realizes that he has been able to look back on his life and accept all the pains and misconceptions he has experienced. His childish state of mind has gone. Thus, Holden really “came into his own”.

Human’s existence is a presence in the world; the outside world will have certain effects on the human heart. Once man is to survive in the society, his heart is vulnerable to be blinded differently. Therefore, even though it is said that Holden may reach a sudden epiphany of the Zen, he will still face the complexity of life and the many temptations. Can he be able to maintain the heart not to be hoodwinked? Do you think he will give up his duties of a catcher? These are the unknowns. No one could answer.

4.3 Inspiration for the modern youth

On the surface, Holden contempts and breaks traditional value, so he feels lonely and painful. In fact, his denial of the traditional value standard let him have a nobler moral and spiritual pursuit. Holden has no ability to change the society and also can not establish a suitable pattern of life. He decides to choose a compromise between the real and ideal. The psychology of contemporary teenagers and Holden’s psychology share much similarity. In this challenging social environment, students should have enough ability to deal with the conflict between ideal and reality, and they should also bear pressure and confusion in current society, so the contemporary students should learn from the experience of Holden more attitudes towards life. Only when the modern youth have the right attitude to challenge and choose, can they withstand the test of life and history, so as to improve their own characters.

1. Conclusion

Growth is an essential and unavoidable part of a person’s life, which could mostly leave wonderful and unforgettable memories to everyone. The Catcher in the Rye is a typical and outstanding initiation novel. With the vivid description by Salinger, it shows the readers a picture of the spiritual crisis of adolescents and the torturous initiation journey when they step into the adult world.

The novel’s strength is the characterization of Holden. As a very complex human being, he is full of contradictions and ambivalent feelings. On the one hand, he cherishes the innocent world of children; on the other hand, he is inevitably entering the decadent world of the adult that he detests very much. The dilemma, however, pushes him to take a conscious attitude of rebellion so that he could maintain the innocence of the children while assimilating into the adulthood. Despite these contradictions, one thing stands out about Holden and that is his unusual kindness, especially the way Holden explains why he wants to be a catcher in the rye shows the kindness and selflessness of his character. Though critics have several different interpretations on the ending of the novel, the writer asserts that Holden’s breakdown leads him back to reality with a new awareness. Holden is reborn as a new healthy and responsible individual.

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