Revolts And Assimilation:a Jewish Reading Of Salinger’s Heroes

Known for the reclusive life style and the success in portraying the rebellious heroes, J. D. Salinger is the most welcome and also the most mysterious American writer in the twentieth century. Salinger’s ideas on "his religious solutions to the crises of alienation and isolation"(Lundquist1) have great impact on the American brainscape and society, triggering the criticism in the role of Salinger’s religious belief on his works. Compared with the dominating analysis of the Zen art, the Jewish identity in Salinger’s heroes have often been ignored, thus making Salinger excluded from the Jewish American literature cannon.Drawing upon the analysis of the common motifs of Jewish American literature and culture and the close reading of all Salinger’s four published works, the thesis presents an analysis of the role of Jewishness in Salinger’s works. It is found that Holden’s ceaseless wandering and Sergeant X’s suffering repeat the motifs in Jewish history and in the cannon of Jewish American literature. I further suggest that the common conflicts between fathers and sons in both Jewish theology and Jewish American community motivate the rebel of Salinger’s heroes when they are seeking for guidance towards maturity. Such heroes as Holden and Franny are frustrated with the misleading of their spiritual fathers and the social ones; furthermore, they wish to reverse their identity to become the fathers in order to control their own fate, reflecting the mindset of the second-generation Jewish American immigrants. However, the heroes often end up with a tragic death, both in the forms of suicide and spiritual death. The failure for their revolt implies the strong coercion of the social power. In the wave of Jewish assimilation in the1950s America, Salinger implies the tragic but inevitable assimilation of Jewish identity in the process of Americanization.The thesis goes to the conclusion that the Jewish identity which Salinger himself may have abandoned is an indispensable part to understand his semi-Jewish heroes. The thesis not only helps the readers get to know the hidden characteristics of Salinger’s heroes but also reflects the psychological dilemma of the American Jews in the process of assimilation and Americanization in the1950s America.