A response to an article on J.D. Salinger

In Dominic Smith’s article “Salinger's Nine Stories: Fifty Years Later” which appeared in The Antioch Review, Fall 2003, the purpose is one, mainly, of exploring J.D. Salinger’s psyche—shaped by his historical contexts, and their subsequent repercussions, surrounding his life and works.

Smith reports of Salinger’s involvement in the wartime effort during World War II: “His job as a soldier was to discover Gestapo agents by interviewing French civilians and captured Germans; he also landed at Normandy and took part in the Battle of the Bulge” (Smith). Smith highlights this experience to show a major catalyst in Salinger’s evolvement; in his life and his writing. Salinger’s war experiences caused him to become very troubled. After returning from war he married—a marriage that lasted only eight months. The divorce, coupled with his war experiences, caused further feelings of alienation from society, and self, which spurred an interest, for Salinger, in Zen-Buddhism. From this perspective Smith feels that we gain a very prominent insight into studying and interpreting Salinger as a man and a writer—through spiritual means. Smith points out that a major correlation between Zen Buddhism and post-WWII outlooks of the time were the concepts, and consensus, of life as illusory, life as suffering, non-attachment to fixed meaning, experience as fragmentary and subjective, intuition as central, a sense of the absurd in human experience, the necessity of irrationality combined with a turning away from absolute coherence and unity (Smith). From this realization one can approach Salinger’s works—especially Nine Stories from which our English 301 class will read “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”—with a more accurate disposition attributed to the mind of Salinger himself.

It was most assured, Smith postulates, that there was an interest on Salinger’s part to explore the psychology of the human mind: rational and irrational, poignant and absurd. Smith goes on to say that “the mysterious inner lives of his characters, the labyrinth of character and story through which he minimally guides us, that slight sensation that we have missed some vital clue to a character's downfall yet recognize that this is the same clue we miss every time we watch the disasters of the evening news or a neighbor's life reduced to tragedy--these arise out of navigating between these poles and become Salinger's fictional legacy” (Smith). The feelings of alienation are common in his works, Holden Caulfield in A Catcher in the Rye, for instance, because they correspond to Salinger’s own feelings of alienation. The stories derive meaning without ever sacrificing the mystery of human experience; they try to suggest more than they try to illustrate and in this way remain illusive at their core (Smith).

I feel that Smith’s insight offers readers, young and old, to explore a unique realm within the works of J.D. Salinger. By understanding the man’s life and experiences we can approach his fictional narratives to be, in some sense, non-fictional interpretations of his great “Zen Quest” of the human mind via his intriguing characters and stories. When our class discerns his “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” we can better understand occurrences of illusiveness and intrigue as literary manifestations of Salinger’s trek into the human mind to explore our thoughts and behavior—one of immense searching for understanding. I, for one, will be very interested to hear Salinger’s take on things.