Salinger characters as role models?


Subject: Salinger characters as role models?
From: Jon Tveite (jontv@ksu.edu)
Date: Fri Jun 13 1997 - 17:50:15 GMT


Rod Lobaugh <ral@xc.org> wrote:

> I have this interesting little option in the whole connecting with
> Salinger thing which you can all roast me for. Maybe the whole
> problem with placeing Seymour or even Holden on this pedestal. Maybe
> they are "bad" examples (whoa, they're picking up chairs to throw,
> let me explain) I mean maybe Salinger wasn't showing something we
> should model.

That raises some good questions, I think. Clearly millions of people
identify with Holden and Seymour, but should they? Does Salinger want us
to do so? I don't know. This issue gets directly to Salinger's authorial
intent, which is difficult to prove one way or another, but stimulating
discussion material nonetheless.

I don't think anyone would suggest teenagers should try to be more like
Holden Caulfield. He seems a rather extreme embodiment of feelings many
of us have, growing up. But at the same time, I don't see _Catcher_ as
very critical of Holden. The only true villain in _Catcher_ is a shallow,
materialistic, insensitive society that doesn't seem to offer much support
or acceptance of intelligent, emotionally fragile young people like
Holden.

I've read literary criticism that takes Salinger to task for failing to
offer any hopeful alternatives to Holden. I don't think that's at all
fair. God, how I hate pat, Hollywood-style happy endings! Do you think
_The Catcher in the Rye_ would have had the same power if, in the end,
Holden developed a passion for ceramics, or some life-affirming flair for
working with autistic children? Hell no! Much of the book's greatness
lies in its honesty: it doesn't offer any facile promises that things will
be all right for Holden -- because we don't know if things *will* be.

Jon (Tveite) <jontv@ksu.edu>
____________________________________________________
"Any peasant with a dumb cow can make whipped cream,
 but it takes a chemical factory to make Cool Whip."

                           -- William Irwin Thompson



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