文学评论阅读.doc

20140603 文学评论阅读 1. 《麦田里的守望者》 The Catcher in the Rye is a bildungsroman, a novel about a young character’s growth into maturity. Holden Caulfield, however, is an unusual character for a bildungsroman because his central goal is to resist the process of maturity itself. As his thoughts about the Museum of Natural History show, Holden fears change and complexity. He wants everything to be easily understandable and fixed, like the statues of Eskimos and Indians in the museum. He is frightened because he is guilty of the sins he criticizes in others, and because he can’t understand everything around him. But he refuses to acknowledge this fear. Instead of admitting that adulthood scares and confuses him, Holden invents a fantasy that adulthood is a world of superficiality and hypocrisy, while childhood is a world of innocence, curiosity, and honesty. Nothing reveals his image of these two worlds better than his fantasy about the catcher in the rye: he imagines childhood as a field of rye in which children run and play; adulthood, for the children of this world, is equal to death—a fatal fall over the edge of a cliff. Throughout the novel, Holden seems to be excluded from the world around him. As he says to Mr. Spencer, he feels trapped on “the other side” of life, and he continually attempts to find his way in a world in which he feels he doesn’t belong. As the novel progresses, we begin to realize that Holden’s alienation is his way of protecting himself. Just as he wears his hunting hat to advertise his uniqueness, he uses his loneliness as proof that he is better than everyone else around him and therefore above interacting with them. The truth is that interactions with other people usually confuse and overwhelm him, and his sense of superiority serves as a type of self-protection. Thus, Holden’s alienation is the source of what little stability he has in his life. As readers, we can see that Holden’s alienation is the cause of most of his pain. He never expressed hi