"Shortly after the close of hostilities, Salinger suffered a post traumatic stress induced nervous breakdown and was hospitalized...It is thought that his profound short story "For Esme with Live and Squalor," written around a character who was a broken soldier, came from firsthand experience."
Read more at Suite101: The Military Service of JD Salinger: Catcher in the Rye Author in World War Two | Suite101.com
Read more at Suite101: The Military Service of JD Salinger: Catcher in the Rye Author in World War Two | Suite101.com
Maybe the twitches that the narrator had are similar to the problems that Salinger had.
~Luisa
I think that's an interesting point to bring out. To add on to what Luisa's saying, I want to repeat what I said in class the other day. In "The Laughing Man", the story takes place in 1928 with a boy of nine years which is the exact age Salinger was in 1928. I believe in that short story, Salinger was also using some of his own life. Also, "The Laughing Man" is the only story so far that is definitely not within the time period of WWII. This goes to show that Salinger's main theme isn't necessarily the war but parts of his own life being threaded into his writing.
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree with both Luisa and Liann. I also noticed that just after his interaction with Esme, the narrator of the story says, "This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes. The people change, too. I'm still around, but from here on in, for reasons I'm not at liberty to disclose, I've disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me" (156). Here, the voice didn't sound like Salinger's classic "Holden-like" character to me. It also didn't sound like the soldier narrating "For Esme--With Love and Squalor". The interesting idea that Liann and Luisa brought up could be reflected here; maybe Salinger is using this short paragraph as an opportunity to secretly tell the reader that the next part of the story is partially about his own life. The reason even the "cleverest reader" might not be able to identify the new alter-ego characters is because not many would pick up on the fact that Salinger is reflecting some of his own life in his stories, including "For Esme...".
ReplyDeleteSalinger's war experiences seem to have certainly had an effect on his fiction. I have yet to read the biography about Salinger that came out a few years ago (by Kenneth Slawenski), but I've heard great things about it. He focuses a lot on Salinger's time in the war. Here's an article Slawenski wrote for Vanity Fair (before the biography came out). It exposes some of the horrors Salinger faced during wartime and discusses how the character of Holden was shaped in Salinger's mind during the war.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/02/salinger-201102.
Sorry--I can't hyperlink in a comment.