The Catch Of Childlike Innocence —A Thematic Study Of J. D. Salinger’s Short Stories

From 1940 to 1953, J. D. Salinger, who published successively over thirty short stories, has laid his status as a well-known fictionist in American literature after WWII. However, studies on Salinger’s short stories are still remain enormous developing space for various reasons. It is necessary to make a deep anatomy of Salinger’s early works and let Chinese academic circle pay attention to Salinger’s literary legacy.This article studies on all of J. D. Salinger’s short stories,while put Nine Stories as a research center. It contains four parts: Part 1 makes a statement on the study of Salinger’s short stories, which is driven from the historical context, Salinger’s personal writing process and the connection within his other novels; Part 2 depicts the eulogistic words of Salinger’s works to childlike innocence and ageless wisdom through the reappearance of the author’s child world, it also uses the theory of myth prototype to explain the intertextuality of children in his stories; Part 3 discusses "the young folks" who transit themselves from children to adults with squalor in Salinger’s works, it elaborates how the war and daily life kill the childlike innocence and the sadness to the death of innocence by the author; Part 4 blends through a trans-cultural vision with Judaism, Christian, Dhyāna and Hinduism, and describes the metaphysical endeavor to call the childlike innocence back in Salinger’s works.Let’s hope this article could eventually get deeper by some theories of cultural studies and successfully prove the profound impact of oriental philosophy to contemporary American writers like Salinger.