The Sound Of Solitude

The present approach to the study of J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories mostly focused on either its themes or writing techniques of the individual story by regarding it as a short story collection. This thesis, based on generic vision, is to probe into both the form and content of Nine Stories and to justify it as not only a short story collection but also an Anti-Bildungsroman.After reading each story closely, this thesis finds the integrity of the book in both its emotional accumulation and thematic development, which makes it a short story cycle rather than a simple collection of short stories. Thematically speaking, Nine Stories portrays a lonely, alienated world where the child/adolescent constructs a reflection to the adult; the latter, so bruised by experience, is temporarily redeemed by the former’s informative innocence. Both the bruised experience and informative innocence shed light on the individual’s loneliness and difficulty in his/her process to maturity. It is in this sense that Nine Stories can be interpreted as an Anti-Bildungsroman which expresses Salinger’s skepticism of one-way maturity as the ultimate as it is promised in the traditional Bildungsroman. Meanwhile, the radical innocence vocalizes the squalid mysteries of maturity and life itself, which are not accepted by the mainstream values and reduced to the fictive characters’"sound of solitude".Great puzzles are that Salinger retreats into hermitage at the height of his glory and that his later works go to extremes of mysticism and ambiguity. With the aid of biographies on and life materials of Salinger, this thesis then discusses his "writing in silence" as a serious author from a cultural perspective. Silence is also a form of speech. Salinger’s work as a whole, pronounces his artistic representation of and philosophical quest on man’s spirituality and existence. Salinger’s silence is his "sound of solitude".