> J.D. Salinger always left his stories very open ended and up for > interpretation. The different meanings and connections a person can make with > a single story are endless. That's what I think the beauty of the stories are, > the many ways they can be. The questions left over by his works that can > ponder in the heads of the reader for days, if not a lifetime. This is the very reason that I for one made such a big deal of Salinger's Zen connections, because I think that this is the very quality he has appropriated/borrowed/homaged in his writings - the idea of ambiguity within succinctness are inherent within Zen. When we as > critical readers, start to breakdown and deconstruct Salinger's work we can > find hidden messages not visible to the naive reader. Does this mean that > these underlying, obscure messages are what the purpose of Salinger's works > are supposed to convey, and they are only supposed to be understood by the > highly intellectual? No, not at all - not everyone on bananafish is an `intellectual'. To me, that implies using certain methods of interrogation on the texts, and it's certainly not what I do. I simply apply what knowledge I have about them to the service of finding more and loose ends to have the fun of tying up. True, that's what so called `intellectuals' do (although with far more knowledge than me) but that doesn't make their reading of a text any more valid than mine, or yours, or anybody's. Being interested in the `teenage' aspect of TCIR is every hit as valid an explanation and point of entry into interpretation as any - in fact, as you point out, we often forget that above all, TCIR is the best teenage novel ever written. In a lot of ways you're the reader Salinger prefers - the `amateur reader', who lets the revelations of the novel be absorbed into themself without questioning them. But it also must be remembered that Salinger may have an alterior motive in this, which is another thing I've discussed before. The amateur reader absorbs ideas of Zen, Taoism, etc secretly packaged within this text with which they find a natural sympathy without even realising - which is in a way an even more Zen way of receiving (and teaching) them than making them explicit. Don't be afraid or daunted when people throw names at you like Barthes, Derrida etc. They're not evoking sacred, inescapable gods here - they're just touching upon people whose ideas are very similar to yours but have put a name (and many books of theory) to these ideas (: Thanks for keeping us all on our toes and reminding us what we're all here for! Camille verona_beach@geocities.com @ THE ARTS HOLE www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442