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2 Literature Review 3
3 Sources of Holden’s Rebellion 5
3.1 The effect of “The Beat Generation” 5
3.2 The role of school 5
3.2.1 Teachers’ Influence 6
3.2.2 Schoolmates’ influence 7
3.3 The factors of family 8
3.3.1 Parents 8
3.3.2 Brother D.B. and Allie 8
4 Actions of Rebellion 10
4.1 Escape from reality 10
4.1.1 Alienation 10
4.1.2 Inner conflicts 12
4.2 Fail to explore identity 12
5 Growing up through Love and Epiphany 14
5.1 The power of love 14
5.2 The search for epiphany 15
5.2.1 Shocking epiphany 16
5.2.2 Spontaneous epiphany 16
6 Conclusion .....19
Bibliography .20
1 Introduction
Jerome David Salinger is the son of a Jewish father and a Christian mother and born in New York City on the first day of 1919. Salinger quit the school after his enrollment at NYU and Columbia University. After that he devoted himself entirely into the writing. Salinger’s education life was not successful or smooth; he skipped from one university to another, and finally graduated from a military school. So the experience in the military school became the basic background of the Catcher in the Rye. He became one of the most influential post- World War Ⅱ writers in the United States.
The Catcher in the Rye indicates the American of 1950s, a world of economic expansion and social satisfaction, which is the sequela of the war. The young, blacks, and women had little power, yet the voice of protesting was muted. By the 1950s, teens wasted their money on fun non-essentials, besides; they imitated the defiant, alienation, rebellious pattern. Fights among gang members, car theft and random violence were reported in the newspapers every day. The novel displays the social and psychological life in 1950s. It is concerned with the youth’s search for identity since they almost lost their initial dreams and selfhoods in that kind of social background. The book is originally written to the adults but it turns to be popular among both adults and children. Almost every American high school students had read that book at that time. It was declare the best-sellers in 1968. Later on, some parts of the novel were used into the text books in the American education.
The protagonist of the Catcher in the Rye is Holden Caulfield, who was an icon for teenage rebellion. The adolescent readers are interested in the themes of teenagers’ confusion, angst, alienation and rebellion. The story is about Holden, a rebellious boarding-school student who attempted to run away from adult world where he feels like that is full of phony. Holden was a hero and a sensitive juvenile as well, who lived in an inner struggle between the beauty inside and the ugly outside. His inner world was filled with anxiety, pain, fear and unrest, which led him into impulsion and nervous.
On his way to seek and understand the meaning of life, Holden spent three days wondering in the New York City after his expulsion from Pencey Preparatory School. It not only painted a vivid and disturbing spiritual world of a middle-class child full of depression and loneliness as well as
contradictory psychological characteristic of a juvenile, but also criticized the hypocritical adult society.
Since the publishing of the Catcher in the Rye, it has been received both popularity and criticism. As the novel was introduced into schools, academic critics began to consider it more seriously whether it was benefit for the young people. The novel enjoyed a relatively large readership, yet many critics treated it like a misleading book for the juvenile. Many scholars and parents worried about Holden’s bad manners and behaviors, his incidents of depression, nervous, impulsion will make influence on their children. Although there are many slangs and vulgarity throughout the novel, they are profitable happened on a young people under that age and that society.