A Study Of The Narrative Communication In The Catcher In The Rye

As a well-known American novelist and short story writer, Jerome David Salinger earned his reputation from the classic novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), which ranks among the most important American literary works of20th century. Since the day of its publication, it has been one of the favorite literary works of youngsters and it has created a literary legend.Critics have almost done studies on every aspect of it, such as language, themes, characterization, narrative structure. They also made efforts to interpret it from various kinds of perspectives, such as symbolism, existentialism, Marxism, Feminism, psychological analysis and so on. However, there is little study on this classical work from the perspective of narratology, not to mention narrative communication. Narratology, as a new developing discipline, is not dead as some narratologists have declared, but on the contrary, it is full of vigor in interpreting a literary work from a new dimension. Here the author of the thesis tries to study the classical work from the perspective of rhetoric and narrative, to provide a new way of research about the greatness of the novel.Rhetoric narrative focuses on the interacting between author, text and reader on the premise of text analysis, especially on how the meaning of a text is conveyed to reader through some specific ways. In his The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth, who doesn't raise the term "rhetoric narrative", is always concerned with the relationship between author, narrator, character and reader from the beginning to the end, which lays the foundation for the rhetoric narrative. In his book Narrative as Rhetoric, James Phelan's definition of narrative as "somebody tells a particular story to a particular audience in a particular situation for, presumably, a particular purpose" also sees narrative as rhetoric. The concepts of rhetoric narrative raised by these critics have several significant consequences for the study of narrative communication.narrative communication is concerned with narrative and rhetoric as well, which is the theoretical basis of the thesis.Under the perspective of rhetoric narrative, the author will present before readers the analysis of the successful narrative communication in The Catcher in the Rye, hoping to make some contribution of the study of this classical work.