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CRITICS
THE CRITICS (SCATCRIT)
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ON JANE
What he especially liked about Jane was that in checkers she kept
her kings in the back row. This has intrigued the critics, but what it
seems to represent is a holding back of one's aggressive powers and an
unwillingness to enter the competitive game and use them against other
people; this is one of Holden's cherished values, and in his case, his
bane as well.
-Gerald Rosen, Zen in the Art of J. D. Salinger, 1977
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HOLDEN AND HUCK FINN
This novel's exciting resemblances to The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn have been justly noted by a number of critics- the
comic irony, the colloquial language, the picaresque structure and the
theme of anti-phoniness and it is not inconceivable that someday
Holden Caulfield may be as well known an American boy as Huck Finn.
For a reader goes through much the same pattern of relishing both
boys: first it is the release provided by their rebellion from
society, then the inspiration of their honesty against sham, and
then the sympathetic awareness of their melancholy roles.
-Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph Blotner,
The Fiction of J. D. Salinger, 1964
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SALINGER'S LOVE OF CHILDREN
Holden can only find genuine love in children, who have not
learned the deadening rituals of pretense.
-Dan Wakefield, in Henry A. Grunwald,
Salinger, A Critical and Personal Portrait, 1962
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In one of his few published comments, Salinger has said of The
Catcher: \"I'm aware that many of my friends will be saddened and
shocked, or shocked-saddened, over some of the chapters in The Catcher
in the Rye. Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all my best
friends are children. It's almost unbearable for me to realize that my
book will be kept on a shelf out of their reach.\"
-David Leitch, in Henry A. Grunwald,
Salinger, A Critical and Personal Portrait, 1962
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THE NEED TO LOVE
The response of these outsiders (Holden and Phoebe, for instance) to
the dull or angry world about them is not simply one of withdrawal: it
often takes the form of a strange quixotic gesture. The gesture, one
feels for sure, is the bright metaphor of Salinger's sensibility,
the center from which meaning derives and ultimately the reach of
his commitment to past innocence and current guilt.... There is
often something prodigal and spontaneous about it, something
humorous or whimsical, something that disrupts our habits of gray
acquiescence and revives our faith in the willingness of the human
spirit. But above all, it gives as only a religious gesture can.... In
another age, Cervantes endowed Don Quixote with the capacity to
perform it and so did Twain and Fitzgerald endow their best
creations... the young man who insists on giving half a chicken
sandwich to a stranger.
-Ihab Hassan, in Henry A. Grunwald,
Salinger, A Critical and Personal Portrait, 1962
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HOLDEN AND SOCIETY
In the epilogue to the novel Holden suggests the possibility of
re-entering society when he says, \"I sort of miss everybody I told you
about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I even
miss that goddam Maurice.\" Holden misses even the phonies of the world
because his experience has taught him something about the necessity of
loving, and here Salinger sounds what is to become his major and
most complex theme.
-David D. Galloway,
The Absurd Hero in American Fiction, 1966
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A LYRIC MONOLOGUE
The Catcher in the Rye, despite its brilliance of observation and
the virtuosity with which Salinger keeps Holden Caulfield's
monologue going for the length of a novel, is primarily concerned
neither with the working out of a plot nor the development of a
character. It is a lyric monologue in which the complex feelings of an
essentially static character are revealed. For all Salinger's skill,
The Catcher in the Rye has a claustrophobic and, at the same time,
random quality.
-Arthur Mizener, in Henry A. Grunwald,
Salinger, A Critical and Personal Portrait, 1962
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A PORTRAIT OF OURSELVES
Rather than wishing quarterly significance or \"greatness\" on him
[Salinger], we can be content to take him for what he is: a
beautifully deft, professional performer who gives us a chance to
catch quick, half-amused, half-frightened glimpses of ourselves and
our contemporaries, as he confronts us with his brilliant mirror
images.
-David L. Stevenson, In Henry A. Grunwald,
Salinger, A Critical and Personal Portrait, 1962
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SALINGER, THE OUTSIDER
The only thing that Salinger does not do for this audience is to
meet with them. Holden Caulfield said in The Catcher in the Rye that
\"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done
reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of
yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like
it.\" It is well for him that all the people in this country who now
regard J. D. Salinger as a \"terrific friend\" do not call him up and
reach him.
-Alfred Kazin, \"J. D. Salinger: Everybody's Favorite,\"
The Atlantic Monthly, August 1961 |
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发表于 2007-8-5 00:34:11