The Catcher in the Rye | The Saint as a Young Man: A Reappraisal of The Catcher in the Rye
In the following excerpt, Jonathan Baumbach explores the meaning of "innocence" in The Catcher in the Rye.
J D Salinger's first and only novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), has undergone in recent years a steady if overinsistent devaluation. The more it becomes academically respectable, the more it becomes fair game for those critics who are self-sworn to expose every manifestation of what seems to them a chronic disparity between appearance and reality. It is critical child's play to find fault with Salinger's novel. Anyone can see that the prose is mannered (the pejorative word for stylized); no one actually talks like its first-person hero Holden Caulfield. Moreover, we are told that...
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