Subject: Chairs and walls
From: Jonathan Moritz (Jonathan.Moritz@educ.utas.edu.au)
Date: Fri Feb 21 1997 - 02:39:43 GMT
I've read two interesting short articles:
Mike Tierce, "Salinger's De Daumier-Smith's Blue period", The Explicator.
v. 42 Fall '83 p. 56-8.
This article discusses how the story has repeated references to chairs as
"the symbol of his new sense of security". Early in the story, he has to
stand on buses, remembers dentist's chairs, and has no chair in his room.
His getting out of the Blue Period is tightly linked by Salinger in text
as: "It may have had something to do with the fact that, before sitting
down to write, I'd brought a chair up from downstairs".
Mike Tierce, "Salinger's For Esme- With Love and Squalor", The Explicator.
v. 42 Spring '84 p. 56-8.
This article discusses how BOTH the rational, reserved Esme and the
spontaneous, emotional Charles are important for X's recovery, in living
with both rational science (squalor?) and spontaneous poetry (love?) in the
world. I think it is wonderful in highlighting how Charles' riddle, of two
walls meeting at a corner, is the kind of meeting envisaged, as with E. M.
Forster's epigraph to "Howard's End", "... only connect", ie the poetry and
prose, etc etc.
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