Jerome David Salinger

Jerome David Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye

It is a critic against false, hypocrite society he belongs to. He prefers to speak with the sister then with the adults. He was against lawyers who make a lot of money and spent a lot of time playing golf and bridge, buying cars and drinking Martinis. They want to save other people's life only to increase their importance.

Plot

The narrator of this novel is an unhappy and sensitive sixteen-years-old American boy, Holden. He has been expelled from his school because of his bad marks and he goes in new York. He wander aimlessly and tries to come to terms with dissatisfactions with the middle-class values. But nothing helps him and he feels depressed and he goes back home, where his sister saves him from despair

The protagonist

Holden is intelligent but also sensitive and he struggles against the society he belongs to, because it is false, corrupt and hypocritical or "phoney". He is no a rebel in the real sense: after his escape he expresses his wish to become "a catcher in the Rye" (someone who catches children that are playing in a field of Rye and prevents them from falling over) who is a father figure.

Style

Holden adopts a convention style; he uses slang words as "gonna", swear words, hyperbole and meaningless expressions. His language is a very effective tool to represent the rebellion of the American teenagers of the late 1950s.

Wistan Hugh Auden

Blues is the philosophical expression of the individual contemplating his situation. The poem reflects Auden's social and political awareness and his solidarity with the Jews persecuted by Hitler. REFUGEE: force to leave his home, country, because of war, political, religious, ideals, economical reasons, have no passport, identity cards. Are homeless, seen as intruder in the country. Pets are treated better then they are and enjoy greater freedom. They are persecuted.

The English Period

Auden is one of the so called "Oxford poets", who in the Thirty used poetry to discuss ideas and to try to improve the world they lived in. He said that the society is the natural condition of the man and that the poetry "tells stories of particular people and experiences, from which everybody may draw his own opinions". The poet's task was to act as a public voice, to support the causes for freedom against tyranny, to express the anxieties of the contemporary left-wing intellectuals.

The influence of Freud and Marx

He was not a modernist and found a revelation in Eliot's poetry. Freud's psychological theories led him to diagnose the ills of his country. The Marx's influence is seen in alienation of the man under capitalism. Then, Brecht influenced him with the alienation that allows the reader not to settle in the story but only to consider.

The move to America

He was disillusioned about the political events such as the Republican defeat in Spain, the Moscow purges (epurazione) and the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact of 1939. To move to America symbolise to feel free about social responsibility of being the leader of the intellectual.

Complex poetry

His poetry was fictional, didactic or fantastic; in type was dramatic, narrative or lyric. He used the free verse and the rhyme; he used ballads and songs. In the English period the quest was for a new society and later becomes a quest for a new life.

Refugee Blues

The blues reflects the sadness and tribulations of the Afro-Americans as opposed to the Gospel song. It is the philosophical expression of the individual contemplating his situation in relation to the condition surrounding him. The peculiarity of the blues is his individual character and also his universality of its content that can be understood by everybody. The blues uses repetitions and elementary rhyme schemes; it is arranged into three lines of verse, the second repeating the first, and the third rhyming with the first two. The poem was written in 1939 and speaks about the flight of the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany.

Langston Hughes

Jazz represents rebellion in a puritan society, the vision of an alternative way of life. He pays attention to the question of the racial identity: Africa as a symbol of lost roots, of a lost past.

Whitman's influence

Hughes and Whitman saw America as a nation in progress. Both were also free in the choice of the subjects. He wants to distinct poetry and prose. Both decides to write behind a mask, an "I", that was not individual but collective. He becomes the poet of the black masses.

The influence of music

He tried to bring oral poetry but no one can understand and appreciate it. He experimented poetry recitals with jazz accompaniment. He chose to go back to the roots of blackness, to deal with its conflicts and contradictions. From slavery to freedom (jazz = to feel free), music had served as an ecstasy-inducer, an escape, an affirmation of the beauty of life. Hughes says that this music is a paradigm of the black experience and a metaphor of the human life. Jazz is a vision of an alternative way of life and represented rebellion.

The question of black identity

The themes are: the temple of jazz, the refuge of the black masses fleeing South, urban ambient. Hughes is preoccupied with the question of the racial identity: he first looked to Africa, which became a symbol of lost roots (because means unknown past). Hughes exalted also the colour of his skin and wrote: "Why should I want to be white? I am a negro".

The Negro speaks of rivers

Hughes looks to ancient civilisations to find an answer to the question of the Afro-American identity. The poem is written in five stanzas with free verse. The tone is meditative, thoughtful and underlined by the use of repetition. The "I" in the poem is collective and represents the black man. The Mississippi is the symbol of the development. The river is the symbol of the eternity and for this reason Hughes has chosen this.

The weary blues

The poem is an effective example of the way music influenced the development of Afro-American literature. The poem is about solitude and man existence, the condition of the black man. The blues is the song of the pain. A pain of a man that seems dead. The setting is old and bear.

Toni Morrison

She is the first black female American writer.

Themes

The themes are the process of growing up black, female and poor; the woman's struggle for freedom against racism and violent American society. She concentrates on the relation between the pressures of community, the patterns established within families, and on the developing sense of self. In the novels there is a penetrating view of the heartbreaking dilemmas which torment people of all races.

Other themes of her novels are misery and desperation of black communities; fight against slavery; sex and violence.

Style

She creates vivid, beautiful language and striking characters. She employs sophisticated narrative devices, like flashbacks and shifting points of view.

Beloved

Sethe escaped North from slavery to Kentucky. She lives with her daughter and an old friend Paul D. (the meaning of D is nothing, non-sense). The world of Sethe changes from one of love to one of violence and death when a beautiful young black woman, Beloved, appears. Sethe gives her hospitality but the girl turns out to become the real master of Sweet home and succeeds in controlling Sethe, Denver and Paul D. The mysterious black girl is Sethe's baby daughter, Beloved, who died at her mother's hands, and whose name is the single word on the tombstone. Thanks to Paul's love, Sethe manages to keep her painful recollections of the past at bay after Beloved's appearance.

This is a story of a black woman who escapes from a cotton plantation. The themes are the racism (2 part), in fact the story speaks about a slave and her attempts to get on with her life as better as she can. Also the family relationships play a very large role. Sethe's love relationship with Paul D. serves as contrast for the overall focus of the story. For the supernatural (1 part) there is the ghost of Sethe's dead baby.

Sethe (black woman) haunted by the slavery is the heroin

Paul D. and Denver want to know more about Beloved but then they discover that there is something strange

The water represents the death because for example from the water comes Beloved, who is the soul of the water. The Water is also life for the amniotic liquid. The Atlantic ocean represents the death because the African were transported from Africa to America and during the travel, someone die.

Represents also the life because the slaves can be free with the Mississipi.

Beloved represents the slavery, because she was killed by the mother because she does not want to became a slave. Represents slavery also because she comes from the water as a slave from the cotton plantation.