塞林格《九故事》中美国梦的破碎(2)
erome David Salinger has lotsof experience on writing. Salinger started writing stories and was the editor of class year book afterhe was enrolled in Valley Forge Military Academy. Salinger attended the evening writing class in1939 but it was not until the second semester that Salinger suddenly came to life and his writingsbecame skillful and full of surprise. After that Salinger started publishing and the teacher of hiswriting class became his mentor. The several of his stories was not successfully published due tothe war related issue. But he continued to write during his stay in the Army and also continued tosubmit his work to The New Yorker which still gained little success. Several months after the UnitedStates joined the Second World War, Salinger was drafted into the army and witnessed numerouscombats. It is during the campaign from Normandy to German that Salinger met Ernest Hemingway,a writer who greatly influenced him. The cruelty of the war effected Salinger’s writing enormously.After Germany was defeated, he later told his daughter: “You never really get the smell of burningflesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.” That leads to the speculation that for alarge part of Salinger’ s stories are his wartime experience and reflection. In 1947 after the successof “the bananafish” , Salinger began publishing almost exclusively on The New Yorker. In order toachieve financial security, Salinger was very eager to sell the film rights of some of his stories inthe early 1940s. But later on he was largely disappointed when his agent told him it was going to be 2a good movie. With this experience, he never allowed any film adaptation to be made of his stories.If there is a book that Salinger stands for besides Nine Stories is The Catcher in The Rye whichdepicting a 16 years old teenage Holden’s experiences in New York City. Salinger once admittedduring an interview with a high school newspaper in 1953 that the book was kind of anautobiography, he said that his boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book ... Itwas a great relief telling people about it. The novel was a great success, The Catcher in the Rye wasreprinted eight times within just several months. However Salinger keep a low profile after thesuccess of The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger published Franny and Zooey in 1961, and Raise Highthe Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction in 1963. Each book contained two shortstories or novellas, previously published in The New Yorker, about members of the Glass family.These four stories were originally published between 1955 and 1959, and were the only onesSalinger had published since Nine Stories. He spent the rest of his life in the countryside of NewHampshire with his passion for writing but seldom publishing anymore.“He is the most influentialbody of work in English prose by anyone since Hemingway”stated by Harold Brodkey, an O’Henry Award winning author. The characters of Salinger’ s story are almost always the very youngpeople, “a consciousness among youths that he speaks for them and virtually to them, in a languagethat is peculiarly honest and their own, with a vision of things that capture their most secretjudgments of the world.” stated by Alfred Kazin (1961). 源Y自:优尔W.论~文'网·www.youerw.com
Salinger's language, especially hisenergetic, realistically sparse dialogue, was revolutionary at the time his first stories were publishedand was seen by several critics as the most distinguishing thing about his work.The notion of American dream originates from the colonial period America. After America holds itsown destine, she is eager to be exploited, to be filled by different kinds of people and at the sametime encouraging everyone who is willing to work from nothing to a prosperous future to come toAmerica to fulfill their aspirations. The American ideals, democracy, rights, liberty, opportunity, andequality in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, and an upward socialcondition for the family and children, achieved through hard work. However, the passing of thetime and the ruthless war changed everything and the once inspiring American dream is no longerpromising, thus leads to the collapse of American dream.In American literature, American dream is an eternal topic, and it is the American dream that expresses vividly the essence of American value. It deeply rooted in the early puritanism, developedduring the Western Expansion in 18th century and disillusioned in the monopolized period.Therefore, American dream has different contents, in different periods because of the influences bydifferent historic events. James Truslow Adams (1980) once expressed his idea in Epic of Americathat American dream far exceeds the longing for material, American dream is to allow theinpidual to be fully developed.