Salinger’s World of Adolescent Disillusion

This philosophical treatment of J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye critically examines the stylistic and situational choices by which the author portrays a callow youth growing up absurd in post-World War II America. The portrait of youthful alienation that Salinger paints in the novel needs to be understood as an abstraction from Salinger’s very individual, fictional cameo of Holden Caulfield as filled with a self-loathing he projects onto others because of his unresolved sense of loss and survivor’s guilt over the death by leukemia of his younger brother, Allie.