3.3 The Distorted Relationship between Children and Parents10

3.4 The Awkward Relationship between Brother and Sister.11

4 Decline of American Dream12

4.1 Free Will is an Illusion.12

4.2 It is Impossible to Be Happy13

5 Conclusion.15

Bibliography 16

1 Introduction

Jerome David Salinger (1919-2010) stood out to be a great American novelist due to his widely-read novel The Cather in the Rye, published in 1951.The Catcher in the Rye is Salinger’s masterpiece which reveals the isolation between people and the phony society after the two world wars. Many researchers both from home and abroad have conducted a lot of research on this novel. Following the success of short stories and The Catcher in the Rye, he led a very private life for a long time. He published his last original work in 1965 and gave his interview in 1980.  

1.1 The Significance of J. D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger was born in an American middle-class Jewish family. The young Salinger attend public schools on the West Side of Manhattan, and in 1932, Salinger’s family moved to there and Salinger was enrolled in to a private school. When Salinger was in secondary school, he began to write short stories, and published most of them in early 1950s before serving in World War II. Salinger, during his writing career, insists on the principle of writing only for himself and only for his pleasure. With this strict attitude and continuous enthusiasm, Salinger left behind many excellent works, such as A Perfect Day for Bananafish (1948), The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Nine Stories (1953). Among them, The Cather in the Rye is viewed of his greatest achievement and owns Salinger’s place in American literature. Being born in a middle-class family, Salinger mainly writes for the middle-class people, especially for the young generation’s spiritual predicaments after World War II. The Cather in the Rye is such kind of a novel that describes the adolescent alienation and loss of innocence in the major character Holden.

The Catcher in the Rye is a sudden success which is very famous among readers of 1950s and 1960s, especially among adolescent readers. Many young Americans admire Salinger and by reading his novel they can find traces of Ernest Hemingway. In a word, after Hemingway no one else enables to change the writing style of 1950s and 1960s until Salinger came into being. After the success of the novel Salinger becomes reclusive and published new works less frequently, and many critics think that Salinger chooses to lead such kind of implicit life because the fact that his imaginative power in writing has declined. However, he chooses implicit life in his most glamorous period only because he cannot tolerate the destruction of his privacy and the society.

1.2 The Significance of Cather in the Rye

The Cather in the Rye, published in 1951, is regarded as Salinger’s most successful novel which arouses many readers’ attention from both home to abroad and is among the 100 best English-language novels from 1951. It has been frequently challenged in America because it literally used profanity and portrayal of teenage angst as well as complex issues of identity, belonging, connection and alienation. The book tells a tragedy of a child who is sixteen, a native New Yorker whose name is Holden. He is expelled from his school because of his poor scores in Pennsylvania and wander around New York city for three days. During his vagrancy in the society, Holden experienced many pains and found the emptiness and isolation of the word and thought that the world is full of emptiness and that the world was not attracted to beauty but to isolation. By detesting the world and its ways, he protects himself from suffering the pain and disappointment of the surroundings. Tired of the alienation of the society, Holden tells his sister that he wants to be a guardian of thousands of children who play in a huge rye on the edge of a cliff and his duty is to keep the children from falling. He thinks that to be the catcher in the rye means saving the children from losing their innocent. Losing hope of finding belonging in the city, however, Holden impulsively decided to return to the reality.