Holden's Vernacular

Nick Martin (thalius22@hotmail.com)
Mon, 13 Dec 1999 23:10:00 -0600 (CST)

Josh,
You wouldn't be the first one to unconsciously start calling everything a 
"phony" over-using the words "I guess" and "goddam" and following all 
adjectives like "sunny" and "rainy" with "as hell." This doesn't make you a 
phony, though. I think Holden would rather appreciate the compliment.

Incidentally, I'm another seventeen year old researcher, doing a series of 
term papers on J.D. Salinger. Three books I've found to be really helpful/ 
fascinating are "J.D. Salinger" by Warren French, "Salinger: a critical and 
personal portrait" ed. by Henry Anatole Grunwald and "In Search of J.D. 
Salinger" by Ernest Havemann.

I don't presume to be enough of a Salinger expert to answer your question 
about Holden's speech myself, but here's a quote from Donald P. Costello, a 
noted analyst and critic, that might help.

"The language of Catcher in the Rye, is, as we have seen, an authentic 
artistic rendering of the type of informal, collqiual, American speech. It 
is strongly typical and trie, yet often somewhat strongly individual; it is 
crude and slangy and imprecise, imitative but occasionally imaginative...it 
exists in Cather in the Rye as only one part of an artistic achievement, a 
language written not for itself but as part of a greater whole." (Grunwald 
276.)


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