Natalie Silva's List: ResearchPaper_NSilva

• The point is that Salinger's protagonist prefers the

  innocence and secrets of childhood to the world of getting and spending where writers give up goldfish for Hollywood gelt. Thus, D. B. gets written off with a single, judgmental word: prostitute.
• Still, as Holden himself readily admits, he just couldn't get around to the "application" business. The rub, of course, is that applying himself puts Holden's innocence under considerable pressure. At Pencey, one is expected to play the game, whether it be the football contest pitting Pencey against Saxon Hall or what Dr. Thurmer, Pencey's headmaster, calls the larger "game of Life." On this last point, though, Holden has his cynical doubts: "Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game all right--I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it. Nothing. No game" (8).
• That said, it is worth observing that Holden fights his battles to preserve innocence on a rather cushy front; his existential tests are not the sort that require him to slog through the mud or to face enemy bombardment.

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• [In the following essay, which was originally published in the New Republic in September 1961, Marple explores the theme of sexual innocence in Salinger's work.]
• There is a certain resemblance to the emotional crisis faced by Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. But Franny is not be saved by a contact with innocence

  • makes the point that Franny cannot be saved but does that mean that Holden was saved through contact with innocence. I disagree, that just further confused him and added to his struggle.
• There is evident, throughout Salinger's writing, a consistent preoccupation with innocence, a preference for the chaste, complemented by the inability of his adult characters to reconcile physical and spiritual love.
• Salinger's first novel, The Catcher in the Rye, is his most eloquent defense of innocence in conflict with an amoral world. There is a certain logic in Salinger's choice of an adolescent protagonist. The chastity of adolescence needs little explanation—idealism will suffice. It is to children and to nuns that Holden turns briefly as outposts of the innocence he desires. Holden places women on a comfortably distant pedestal, divorced from sex. Although he loved lane, he never puts the purity of his love to any test of physical expression. He avoids contacting her. What is suggested or hinted at in Salinger's earlier work is full grown in his novel—the idealization of the celibate, the chaste, and the innocent.

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• G

  olding accentuates loss of innocence and reason, development of overarching brutality, anarchy and fall from humanity to unbridled animality as the consequences of such desertion from civilization.

• In the end Ralph 

   

  "Wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy." (Chapter 12, page 184) 
• Golding propounds an opposite view, he sees man as naturally evil
• The painted faces, with a fierce look in eyes, spears in hands, naked and ululating, they were boys--Were they schoolboys who had said 'yes sir'? Daylight might have answered 'yes' but the darkness and death said 'no'. This was the loss of innocence and identity, Ralph wept for
• Th

  is loss was gradual. Earlier a little compunction could have made Maurice uneasy on account of teasing the littluns. Roger's arm was also conditioned by the traces of civilization and he flinched stones at a harmless distance. Here, "yet invisible, was the taboo of old life " (Chapter 4, page 56). But later on the same Roger threw a boulder on piggy putting him to death.

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• It may be that Golding's acute sense of this pollution has in part to do with his background. He grew up in Marlborough, in Wiltshire, a kind of rural quarantine, an innocent English idyll (it becomes the village of Stilbourne in The Pyramid). Golding's parents lived in an old house on the Green, next to the churchyard, and he has written powerfully about his childish discovery that bodies, stacked on the other side of his garden wall, were lying pointed into the family garden. “I made the final deduction that the dead lay, their heads under our wall, the rest of them projecting from their own place into our garden, their feet, their knees even tucked under our lawn.” It is a characteristic Golding moment. I ask him about it. “At that age,” he says, “our garden was the one uncontaminated place. It was innocence incarnate. I suppose death impinged for the first time in my life.”