| Jerome David Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is his first and only novel. It was published in 1951. It gained immediate popularity among the American young readers, especially the high school students, and it has been reprinted time and again. This novel is about the three-day adventure of a dropout Holden Caulfield, which vividly reflects a sense of alienation, bitterness, loneliness and a sense of loss existing among the young Americans, from post-war period to the early 1950s. It is called "the twentieth century picaresque" novel, or "the modern Huckleberry Finn". Holden is tired of the phoniness and degeneration in the modern civilization, but he does not know how to tackle the problem. Thus he tries to escape from the society. Through fruitless struggle, he is eventually driven crazy. The greatness of the novel lies not only in the authentic revelation of the inner world of the young generation, but also in the rendering of schoolboy vernacular used by the adolescents in the late 1940s and early 1950s.This dissertation mainly deals with the narrative language and the language traits in The Catcher in the Rye, discusses its theme, and the character traits of Holden Caulfield, who is also the narrator of the novel. The narration is similar to "skaz". J.D. Salinger pursues the colloquialism of the narrative language, and distills the colloquial language and makes it into literary language that profoundly reflects the literary contents. In the novel, the narrator is offered much vulgar even obscene but authentic language. Furthermore, Salinger is brave enough to innovate the traditional pattern of the colloquial language, giving the seemingly vulgarlanguage various meanings and skillfully uses some literary language carrying sensibly connotations, to offer the narrator double language levels which are conflicting with each other. It deeply discloses the host and narrator Holden Caulfield's inner world of contradiction, hesitation, loneliness and despair. Holden's vernacular is that of teenagers, but he uses it to express the thoughts similar to that of adults, which adds to the humorous flavor of the novel, and for which reason, the writer believes, it owns large number of readers.The Catcher in the Rye has remained controversial since its publication. The critics have tried to criticize it from different aspects. For example, they try to analyze the characteristics of Holden Caulfield; his words and behavior and the basis for his words and behavior; the use of symbolism in the novel, etc. Some even compare Holden with Huck in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, yet the two of them really have some similarities. Although there are a few critical essays on The Catcher in the Rye in our country, many of them are based on the translation version by Mr. Shi Xianrong. And the writer of this dissertation thinks that as a language learner, it is necessary to go deeper into the source language of the novel to have a better understanding and more careful study of the language used in the novel, so that we can further understand the author's writing purpose and the theme this novel presents.This dissertation consists of five parts. After a brief introduction of the author J. D. Salinger and his writing style, the writer goes on to give a general account of The Catcher in the Rye. In the second part, the writer mainly analyzes the language traits in the novel in which five typical characteristics have been found, i.e., colloquialization, loose structure, vulgarism and obscenity, slang and trite wordsawith new meanings. Additionally, the writer analyzes the background in which this novel is written. In the third and forth part, the writer discusses respectively that those language traits are an effective means of characterization and theme presentation. Through general analysis of the narrative language, the theme and the characteristics of Holden Caulfield, then in the last part, the writer of this dissertation aims to reach such a conclusion that Holden Caulfiel...
|
PDF Full Text Request