The Collision of Childs World with the World of Adults in Nine Stories: Ingenuousness vs. Insensitivity - Essay Example

?Introduction Salinger’s stories, almost all of them, are devoted to the problem of transition from the world of the child, a genuine world of sincere feelings, into the adult world, the world of strict frameworks imposed on the style of behavior, thoughts, inner world; or to the comparison of these two worlds. It is very difficult to get used to the frameworks, they maim and kill all the natural and alive. Children in Salinger’s stories are capacitors of happiness, naturalness and confusion, who, in each of these nine stories, are questioning the “necessity” and stereotyped correct adult behavior. In adult world the adult who forgot how to properly behave and how things should properly be is not considered normal. He either pretends with an incomprehensible purpose to be a child—but the falsity is easily seen—or he is not well, but ill, wrong, inadequate for the reality which imposed its own laws. The Collision of Child’s World with the World of Adults in Nine Stories: Ingenuousness vs. Insensitivity By Salinger, a person is strange if he does not understand the relativity of the world and does not understand the precariousness of what is called immutable. This idea is conveyed by his character, the boy Teddy. All his actions, his manners, his thoughts belong to a child. And at the same time, he becomes like a dream of the author of the child who has absorbed the best, not repulsive and trivial traits of an adult. Adults play in this story episodic roles, in the whole they are merely a demonstration. They emphasize their insensitivity, stereotyping (they’re not taking Teddy seriously, because it’s impossible in the adult world), inconsistency, lack of coordination between two worlds, one of which is governed by the light, lively and bright, and another by familiar, static, and trivial. In The Laughing Man a child on whose behalf the story is told, readily believes in the story of the Laughing Man, and indeed the whole life for him is an exciting game in this tale, flavored with romantic notions about his affiliation to it (as if he is a secret descendant of the Man) as well as the remaining twenty-four “Comanches”. But the story is told not by a child, as if everything had happened a long time ago and events have taken, as usual they take over time, a little more streamlined and uniquely beautiful romantic form. A particular value to this story is given by the narrator’s nostalgia, a longing for a permanently vanished child’s happiness, this naive belief in the Laughing Man, a longing for a strange and ridiculous, naive opportunity to get lost “...somewhere on that tricky stretch of terrain between the Linit sign and the site of the western end of the George Washington Bridge”, for misunderstanding of the adults, which frees of all the real and mundane, that poisons adulthood. A wise, understanding adult appears in another story in this series – Down at the Dinghy. This is the mother of a little boy. The boy always runs away from home, he does not agree, he cannot take the adult world in which it is accepted and normal to say bizarre, hurtful things. The protest of this story is completely in tune with the protest of Teddy. A boy, alone in his secret knowledge of something (which is the understanding of injustice, categoricalness and nastiness of all things around), unwilling to accept the existing rules and concepts, he shuts himself with a wall, through which initially even his mother cannot pass. But while Teddy is fully aware of what he does, Lionel is too young to understand everything. All that he has are alive, exuberant feelings, and the protest and dissent are subliminal in nature. The story Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut shows a terrible precipice with a narrow path on its edge. Life has become a tragic absurdity after a ridiculous coincidence that caused the death of Eloise’s husband. Eloise fell into this precipice, and she is perfectly aware of this. She flies down, dragging Ramona, her daughter, who in her loneliness comes up with the friends, trying to escape from the world of her mother. Despite the fact that many of the Eloise’s feelings are already dead, the idea of ??what is right, how things “should be” is still alive. Not being able to restore order in her life, she tries to make Ramona’s life the way it should be by the invented canons of adult world. But, as it turns out there is no way out for Eloise: all the feelings are dead, except depression and feeling of the hopeless abyss under her feet. The same life empty inside, driven to this state by the same absurd and stupid coincidence, or more precisely the war, belongs to Seymour, whose way of life was described by Salinger in his narratives about the Glass family. Seymour’s dialogue with Sybil—a little girl in a yellow bathing suit—his gentle endearing nicknames, a game which he offers to play, charming the girl – all this is permeated with tenderness. But this manifestation of feelings, long forgotten and buried, probably, by Seymour, once again proves him of the inconsistency of life, loss of all what would be worth living. Feeling this girl, her naivete, naturalness, her inability to live in the past is in comparison with Seymour’s knowledge, experience, lack of meaning; understanding of this fatal difference becomes deadly for him. Another image, of course, full of tenderness and author’s sympathy is the image of Esme in the story For Esme:--with Love and Squalor. She is the girl who grew up during the war; a small girl, but she understands that only strong and adult people can survive in this time. She tries to grow up, to speak as an adult, to stay with dignity. But the author is particularly touched by the child who makes her way through the defensive wall. Charles, her brother, despite his very formal and clearly wrong name, is completely different – unrestrained, impulsive, lively and bright child. It seems to be the merit of Esme – becoming an adult she saved her brother’s childhood. In two stories - De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period, and Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes - there is no trace of the war. They are the eternal Salinger’s longing for authenticity, which in De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period is remarkable for its desperate dissatisfaction. The protagonist of the story, whose nickname is De Daumier-Smith, is a good artist, who sees his life only in his work, who is just a child by character and his actions; lively, bright, agile, active and restless, he longs for literally everything. He is somewhat similar to Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, perhaps because of his undying desire to experience everything, his impressionable character and search for new experiences. But the search always bumps into almost insurmountable obstacle made of the surrounding adults, who are quite opposite to him in everything. Trying to make himself an adult, representative in the eyes of others, and thereby increase his prestige, failed, despite even a suit, that the hero himself considered as very elegant. De Daumier-Smith, probably will remain a child forever, and live his life in search of his sister Irma, ascended by him to heaven and turned into a dreamboat. In the story Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes Salinger also creates an image of an adult who pretends to be a child, but the picture here is different. Joanna is a kind of parody of a child; she’s more infantile than really ingenious and unpredictable. She plays with people, and apparently, it is the only thing that amuses her life. Nothing could be worse for Salinger’s character than when the author portrays him as a parody, but even more so – a parody of the child. Arthur really believes Joanna is a child, he sees no hypocrisy, easily allows her to deceive him. In this story there is no character that actually can have author’s sympathy. Even Arthur, who, it would seem, can be treated with compassion, is not forgiven for his mistakes. Read More