SOURCE: "Literary Continuity in Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street," in The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. XXXVII, No. 1, Autumn, 1995, pp. 67-79.

In the following essay, Matchie analyzes the similarity of narrative patterns and styles, characters, and language between Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, and Cisneros's The House on Mango Street

In 1963 in a collection of articles entitled Salinger, Edgar Branch has a piece in which he explores the "literary continuity" between Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Branch claims that, though these two books represent different times in American history, the characters, the narrative patterns and styles, and the language are strikingly similar, so that what Salinger picks up, according to Branch, is an archetypal continuity which is cultural as well as literary. I would like to suggest a third...