Re: holden caulfield vs therapist
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Sun, 13 Jun 1999 16:38:56 +1000
I think the phenomena of the unreliable narrator is quite a fascinating one
- someone like Nabokov makes a very interesting (and much less oblique) use
of it in a lot of his works, for example. I liked it in Margaret Atwood's
`Alias Grace', too. I wonder if the difference here though is that Salinger
doesn't know that he or Buddy is being unreliable. Or does he? It seems
hard to believe that Salinger would do wrongly by Seymour with or without
his fictional alter ego.
Expat Aussie, eh? (: Where abouts are you from originally?
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
@ THE INVERTED FOREST http://www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest
Graham Preston wrote:
> Camille,
>
> Like you, I've long since not trusted Buddy as a narrator at all. His
> Seymour never seemed to be a real person, who I could relate to. Even in
> Bannanafish , Seymour sauters around the beach doing little that seemed
to
> be the actions of this great person Buddy seems to try to rid himself of,
> through his writing. But, the diary section of Raise High had more
impact
> on me this last time than ever before. It seems that I finally "got it".
> This Seymour was real to me, in a way that Hapworth never spoke to me or
> any of the other paintings of Seymour we get to form his uneven, bumpy,
> and constantly evolving collage of him, we read of. Anyways, so did
Buddy
> "write" Hapworth, instead of just publish a 40 yr old letter? I think
yes.
> -end of rant-