Coming of Blog

In class, I was quite surprised when everyone concurred that Holden was writing about his own experiences over the few days after he left Pencey. The whole time, I was thinking that he was dictating it to someone else. I think that both approaches have their own meanings. If Holden himself were the author, the book really is a direct message from him to the reader. He's presenting his story so that it would resonate best with his ideal audience: other kids who might not know where they are in life. He also has more control over the product, and can more easily manipulate the story and its language to better convey the message that he's trying to send. If he dictated the story to some dude, which was I was thinking, the story suddenly becomes more authentic. Holden doesn't have the ability to doctor the story to his own ends. Another effect would be that Holden isn't talking to us, the reader--he's talking to someone else, who he might have reason to trust. This se...

Bildungsroman , German for "education novel", is the term for a work of literature that deals with the psychological and moral growth during the formative years of a character's life. Examples include Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship  by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and The Catcher in the Rye  by J.D. Salinger. In other words, it's a "coming of age" novel. James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a specific type of Bildungsroman, called a Kunstlerroman --the "artist's novel". The distinction is that while a Bildungsroman typically ends with the protagonist integrating themselves into society having found or created their true self, the Kunstlerroman's protagonist ends on a high note, where the protagonist realizes their vocation as an artist. I find this clear difference in final message to be interesting. In many classic bildungsromane, such as Emma  by Jane Austen, Tom Jones  by Henry Fielding and the aforementio...