《麦田里的守望者》的主题思想和象征手法的运用
1. Introduction
In 1951,Jerome David Salinger published his first well-known novel, The catcher in the Rye, with which he gained an almost immediate reputation as one of the foremost post-world War ⅡAmerican novelists. Shortly afterwards, the book became assigned reading for a majority of high school and college English courses in America. No other writer since War Ⅱ has achieved the heights of popularity of J.D. Salinger. And we can say that his popularity has rested primarily on one character, Holden Caulfield, in the book.
The novel tells a seemingly simple story of a 16-year-old boy, Holden Caulfield,who, after being expelled from the school for failing almost all of his courses, runs away from that hateful place to New York and spends three days there, roaming around in search for some goodness and the true value which he vaguely understands. With suffering uneasiness and a bitter spirit, he encounters many different people, only to find hypocrites and liars everywhere. Finally, he sneaks home to see his sister Phoebe, an unspoilt, angel-like child who helps him find the courage to live on in this corrupted adult world.
Salinger?s success surprised the critics as well as the reading public. Critics searched and are still searching for justification for such overwhelming success in literature. They emphasize the spiritual disillusionment, the psychological stress of the adolescents in post-war America, and the creation of a life-like character. These are,
admittedly, important and primary factors contributing to the immediate success of the novel. However, many authors have lightly touched upon one literary technique, which Salinger employs extensively, and which helps the author to achieve what he wants to achieved—the use of symbols. This thesis tries to deal with this aspect of Salinger?s style of writing and in relative detail I shall try to show how, step by step, the author underlines the basic theme of the novel by using symbols and how symbolism plays an irreplaceable role in the boy who is also a literary representative of the whole generation of American youth, and in the realistic portrayal of a whole generation through a baffled youngster-Holden.
While emphasizing the significance of Salinger?s writing style, especially the use of symbols in the whole narrative, we do not want to ignore the social background at that time in America that seems necessary.
The Catcher in the Rye was given accurate description in the postwar period, which was a sober and realistic time. The 1950s was the time when American social ideology changed quickly. The economy had already recovered from the Great Depression and America became the richest country in the world through war business. The living standard in America was raised considerably. The number of the Middle Class increased sharply. People, especially the youth, seized the opportunity that the prosperity had brought people to pursue all the modern pleasures.
But the bright days were shadowed by a spiritual and cultural crisis in American society. With more material comfort, and more people lacked the spiritual belief. What?s more, the trend of existentialism was flooding in the western countries at the
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time, greatly influencing the youngsters in America. The main character of the book, Holden, has the feature of existentialism—a rebel in spirit, a coward in behavior, despise the false, the vulgarity and the convention.
Though their family could supply them with material life, they still felt depressed and began to doubt whether the material comfort really meant anything in life. In a passive way, they adopted the decadent way of life—drinking excessively，taking drugs and enjoying sex freedom —as an expression of their dissatisfaction with the society. As a result, many of these young people became social “dropouts” which historians call “The beat Generation”. Youngsters at this period of time sensed something was wrong but did not know what and wanted to rebel but did not know how.
We see that Salinger sensitively depicts the time he knows well. He chooses intelligent, sensitive and very self-conscious adolescent as his main character representing all the problems his generation of youth confronted. The young man suffers from the “phoniness” in the corrupted society and struggles vainly to find a way out. Salinger feels and analyses the abnormal modern society through a symbolic structure of language, motif, and episode. Throughout the book, Salinger emphasizes on the conflicts between the spirit and material, the reality and imagination, the living and the death.
Ihab Hassan comments on Salinger?s novel saying that “It is the new look at the American Dream especially dramatized by the encounter between a vision of innocence and the reality of guilt, between the forms love and power have tended to
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assume in America. The natural locus of the conflict in the work of Salinger is childhood and adolescence. In them the counter play of hope and despair, participation and withdrawal, commands a full range of comic that is ambivalent, reference: it is the old story of the self against the world in outlines by a mass society.
It is because the novel presents a picture of the confused mind of a sixteen-year-old boy in a few days in his life, during which the protagonist tries to understand a world which is far beyond his scope of understanding, the narrative becomes a very complicated mixture of various kinds of ideas behind a seemingly innocent and unsophisticated monologue. Only symbol can be a tool powerful enough to capture such complicated mind of one under great psychological stress and this is exactly what Salinger uses to enable the reader to perceive reality from the inside, and to find meaning through it. However, the term symbolism is ambiguous. It can mean “both a system of symbols or representation, and the practice of using symbols, especially by sensuous representation.”
From this, we can see, the “symbol” has extended its meaning to denote every conventional representation of idea by form. When the symbol is shown a reader, he sees, hears, and feels something else ---he receives the range of meaning beyond the thing itself. Some symbols are “conventional” or “public”. For example, the cross is a symbol of Christianity; the rose is a symbol of beauty and love. While some other symbols are “particular” ones which are influenced by the reader?s own interpretations and understandings. Therefore, a symbol may mean differently for different readers with their own different life experiences and cultural backgrounds.
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For instance, the color “red” indicates prosperity, happiness in China; while in the western countries, it may symbolize the madness and violence. Here cultural difference plays its role, just as much as personal differences.
Some symbols closely connecting with an idea or person and are easily recognized; others have to be understood in a social, cultural or psychological context. Symbols employed by Salinger in his The Catcher in the Rye are mostly of latter type. Real symbol has magic and life, which it brings to a complex and subtle situation. Everyone?s feeling is different from every other at every moment of his comprehension. The emotional changes as we actually experience them are often beyond the power of any writer to put them down through the conventional means of description. One needs to resort to symbols to reflect, to reveal the unconscious emotional situations.
It is clear that symbols are the artist?s means of creation patterns of thought and emotion, which do not previously exist. A symbol, however, must have a specific reference or a cluster of them to which it is somehow specifically attached. There may be ambiguities, because its value is to be achieved by the understanding of the reader, who is to participate in the artist?s perception and creation. What we should do is to keep our eyes open for literary symbols so they can bring out the effect, which the author wants to evoke.
In the following chapter, I would like to discuss in relative details how Salinger uses these symbols to achieve the powerful effect of the novel. This thesis will concentrate on a discussion on Salinger?s use of symbols in the novel to bring out its
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《麦田里的守望者》的主题思想和象征手法的运用_英语专业毕业论文
