Jerome David Salinger: A Spokesman for the Disillusioned and Lost Adolescents
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Abstract
Adolescence is a beautiful transitional phase of a human life. It carries one from innocence to maturity, from childhood to adulthood and prepares a child for the roles that society expects from an adult. Adolescence not only marks some major physical changes but also cognitive transitions in children. And usually this expansion of personality leads to “identity crisis”. An adolescence psychologist penned, “Not until adolescence does the individual develop the prerequisites in physiological growth, mental maturation and social responsibility to experience and pass through the crisis of identity.” (Erikson, 1968, p.91). Jerome David Salinger is one of the most influential writer who affiliated his writing’s major elements with this issue. He represented himself as a spokesman for the lost and disillusioned youth of post World War II. He delineated this painful transition in almost all his works that include a novel and various short stories. His most important work The Catcher in the Rye along with the other short stories make a massive volume of adolescent’s experiences. This paper deals with those issues, dexterously articulated by Salinger’s characters. And as the cure to a disease is in disease itself therefore, the paper would explore the imminent solutions for the raised issue.
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