Learning to Be Yourself

2024

This paper aims at investigating the concept of identity crisis in post WWII American literature as a manifestation of the individuals' troubled identity of the time. It takes Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) as a central literary body that elucidates the work’s purpose. The main focus is to analyze the protagonist Holly Golightly’s identity crisis through Erik Erikson’s theory of psycho-social stages of development and centers its attention on two particular stages namely, identity vs. role confusion and intimacy vs. isolation. This research helps the reader to understand the struggles faced by the protagonist in maintaining her stable identity as well as her difficulty in establishing long-term relationships with the other characters throughout the novella. In short, this study concludes that Holly’s failure to achieve a strong ego identity and her inability to forge solid interpersonal relationships contribute to her crisis of identity. Thus, her eventual escape serves as a symbol of her alienation. Keywords: alienation, distantiation, identity crisis, intimacy, isolation, role confusion.

Regarding the cultural transformation of American society after World War II, Holden became the activist of youth counter culture which is against having phony motives in a society that experienced sharp transition from the depressed to wealthy society to wealth but insecure society. I aimed to prove that Holden Caulfield’s unbalanced psychological state reveals the realistic representation of adolescence called youth counterculture of the post war II era by becoming the inner voice of teenagers as regards to his observation and experience in the society, his oral expose and his relationship with his surroundings.

Journal of Modern Literature, 2011

This article explores the quality of lightness in Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Precisely what kind of lightness do we find in the novel, what are some of its defining characteristics, and what are the key strategies by which this effect is achieved? I begin by discussing the narrative's readability, its linguistic transparency and its deliberate attenuation of supplementary meaning. This transparency, I would like to suggest, ultimately impedes our standard interpretative procedures, frustrating any attempt to reinstate (plausible) symbolic meaning. I then address in greater detail the 'depthlessness' of the novel, its emphasis on surfaces and immediate legibility. Finally, I offer an analysis of Holly Golightly herself, making the argument that as a character she shares (and indeed determines) many of the novel's lighter qualities - attaching supreme value to 'the surface of things,' privileging the signifier over the signified, and actively pursuing the freedom and mobility of non-meaning.

The Journal of International Social Research, 2021

Jerome David Salinger’s only novel Catcher in the Rye provides one of the most vivid pictures of the mid-20th century United States of America. Experience of the Great War, the Great Depression, and the World War II deeply affected American society and after the war ended the only target became a society in consensus. Presidencies of Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower shaped the political, social, economic and cultural agendas of the following decade. A period of conformism, conservatism and consumerism began and the American society changed drastically. The protagonist of the novel, Holden Caulfield, who delivers a story of his journey to the New York City, represents the rebellious character that emerged during this period. While looking for the roots of this type of personality it becomes obvious that the historical and philosophical background of the USA and the world in general plays a crucial role in the formation of such a hero. Peculiar political, economic, and scientific events that unfold during the first half of the 20th century affect his profile and turn him into a rebel against the established social order. Hence, analyzing the historical and philosophical context of the novel and the events revealing within the story, the article aims to clarify the effects of the zeitgeist on the character of the American hero and his rebellious identity.

The European Journal of American Culture, 2010

This article focuses on the themes of self and selfhood raised in the 2008 film Revolutionary Road and the 1961 novel of the same name. These texts, I suggest, demonstrate how American culture has been performing a double movement since World War II, simultaneously appealing to an essential, stable notion of the self while ingraining a sense of emptiness and incompleteness in individuals. Using Judith Butler's concept of performativity as its main theoretical framework, the article approaches Revolutionary Road from three angles. First, it explores the transformation of the American aesthetic by focusing on the setting in which the plot takes place -the suburbs of New York in the 1950s. Second, the article investigates the sweeping changes that occurred in the workplace during this period, focusing mainly on the autonomous Marxists' concept of virtuosic and immaterial labour. Finally, the article considers Lacan's theory of desire as it relates to the domestic sphere. The article concludes by arguing that these texts represent a subtle 'revolution' in American thought that encourages readers and audiences to embrace the performative nature of the self rather than attempting to satisfy what Cushman calls 'the empty self', which can never be satisfied.

Bingöl University Journal of Social Sciences Institute, 2022

The Catcher in the Rye is a social critique of the realities of America after World War II. The author, J.D. Salinger, addresses the psychological traumas and social changes after the war and adolescent problems. However, readers see social realities through the eyes of an adolescent, Holden Caulfield. Holden rebels against the conditions of modern life and adults’ intervention in the adolescent world; his rebellion is an escape. Since adolescence has its own culture and language, the adolescent language in the novel is unique and is an uncensored adolescent expression. It is this voice of adolescence that causes a conflict between adults and adolescents. Thus, Holden is both an adolescent critique of American society in the 1950s and an adolescent response to that society. In this study, adolescent problems and what shaped their development are excavated in terms of the way adolescents and adults perceive life.

2015

The Southern Quarterly, 2020

2018

The narration of Holden Caufield in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye depicts the confusion and interior struggle that a vulnerable adolescent goes through as he starts a journey to explore the world of adults with very confused and resisting attitude. Holden’s reaction during his exploration and observation of adult life in New York reflects the identity confusion he is experiencing and the uncertainty of what he is and what he wants to be. The purpose of this paper is to present a critical analysis of The Catcher in the Rye from a psychoanalytical perspective to examine how Salinger in this novel dramatizes Erik H. Erikson’s and James E. Marcia’s psychoanalytic theories of adolescents’ identity confusion. When Holden fails to integrate with the new merging identity of adulthood as a way of preserving his own idealism, a kind of resentment is developed towards everything that represents this threatening new identity.This rejection is manifested in Holden’s disgust of all the ...

A Teenage Wasteland: Catcher in the Rye, 2020

A Teenage Wasteland: Catcher in the Rye Our thoughts about war often formed by literary works and surely no other writer could be associated with war more than Ernest Hemingway. He visited many battlefronts during in his lifetime, and he was even wounded by an Austrian mortar shell. (Waldhorn). His experience of war along with his dedication to realism played a fundamental role for most of his works. He held his experience of war so close to his heart that it became a lifetime concern. He dealt with what happens to the soul after going through war and how one can cope with it. Of course, he was neither the first nor the last author who experienced the cruelty of war. In fact, Hemingway befriended another author during the war, the famous J. D. Salinger. (Hoban) Salinger's experience of the war was as firsthand as Hemingway's, and one could say his battle scars ran even deeper than his comrade; he was one of the first American soldiers to ever witness Nazi concentration camps where he saw numerous burned victims of hate and tyranny. (Hoban) Yet his works does not carry the traces of war as explicit as Hemingway does. There are no battlefields, no guns, no concentration camps, no soldiers, and nothing related to war whatsoever. In his famous work, Catcher in the Rye, we are only presented with a teenage boy, Holden Caulfield and his wander-ings around the New York City. Characterized partially by his untimely grey hair and skinny appearance, Holden Caulfield is both the narrator and protagonist of the novel, and tells his story after being expelled from his school mainly because academic failure. His voice carries an adolescent attitude in which one can feel his alienation among society; a stranger that can neither fit in nor met with the