Salinger, Jerome David - The Catcher in the Rye

New literary trend

During the second half of the 50s and in the 1960s, a new literary tendency developed. It was mainly characterized by the use of a fragmentary and irregular language and style. Moreover, its literary themes focused on rebellion against the value and the principles of society such as work, family and the normal life of urban life.
The most important book is represented by the novel “The Catcher in the Rye”, published in 1951 and written by Jerome David Salinger.

The novel is a Bildungsroman (coming-of-age-novel) and it focuses on the history of a perennially uncomfortable young boy who cannot find his own place in society; he feels uncomfortable at high school and with family and friends too.

Holden's inner world

The novel focuses on the inner world of a teenager who is becoming a man, whose maturity, nonconformity, the pursuit of a personal lifestyle, the difficulty of maintaining an equilibrium without becoming the same as others. Holden talks about the abandonment of the small college of curiosity about adult life and suspicion about them, tells the discovery of the metropolis, and long walks without a goal. But in the center of the narrative there is the regional intimacy of Holden, his continuous dialogue with himself through which a sense of anger often unmotivated with others in the situations in which he comes to find.