War, Identity Crisis, and Spiritual Quest in J. D. Salinger’s Fiction
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Abstract
In this article, we propose a sociocritical reading of the themes of war, identity crisis, and spiritual search in J. D. Salinger’s narrative. We will restrict our analysis to those works by the author in which the selected themes are best articulated: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948) and “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” (1950).
The choice of corpus responds to reasons intrinsic to Salinger’s work. The selected stories are not only among the author’s best-known works and those most widely analyzed by criticism, but also the ones we consider most representative of his narrative and those that contain a programmatic synthesis of the themes of war, identity crisis, and spiritual search, as they would later be developed throughout J. D. Salinger’s fiction.
As a theoretical motivation, we seek to address the lack of sociohistorical perspectives in Salinger criticism, which we believe can yield novel results by placing Salinger’s work in relation to a broader context. We will use as our theoretical framework Lucien Goldmann’s theory known as “genetic structuralism,” which will allow us to establish an analysis whose scope ranges from the immanent understanding of textual structure to its transcendent explanation through its inclusion in broader meaningful structures, such as the historical and cultural context of the period, the social class to which the author belonged, and the literary field in which his work has become canonized.
As a result of our research, we will confirm, in Salinger’s work, the presence of a worldview that we have called “religating” and that maintains a relation of homology with the worldview corresponding to the American enlightened bourgeoisie of the 1950s. The worldview present in Salinger’s work is a consequence of the confrontation between the author and the society of his time, a confrontation that can only be resolved through the construction of a new worldview that deals with the social and identity-related problems of the 1950s and with the consequences of the Second World War.
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