The Catcher in the Rye Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 79 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Catcher in the Rye.

The Catcher in the Rye Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 79 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Catcher in the Rye.
This section contains 2,566 words
(approx. 7 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Catcher in the Rye Study Guide

In the following excerpt, 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 over insistent 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 Holden, as poor little rich boy, is too precocious and specialized an adolescent for his plight to have larger-than-prepschool significance. The novel is sentimental; it loads the deck for Holden and against the adult world...

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This section contains 2,566 words
(approx. 7 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Catcher in the Rye Study Guide
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