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Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye Author: Lilian R. Furst Date: 1978 From: Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue canadienne de littérature comparée(Vol. 5) Reprint In: Contemporary Literary Criticism(Vol. 378) Document Type: Critical essay Length: 6,856 words

Full Text: [(essay date 1978) In the following essay, Furst compares The Catcher in the Rye with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. She identifies similarities between the works’ narrative techniques and depictions of their protagonists’ alienation from both themselves and society.]

‘I love Kafka, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Proust, O’Casey, Rilke, Lorca, Keats, Rimbaud, Burns, Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, Henry James, Blake, Coleridge’ Salinger declared in the summer of 1951 at the time of the publication of The Catcher in the Rye in the most revealing of the few interviews he has ever granted.1 That statement alone would form a tenuous basis for a rapprochement of Dostoyevsky and Salinger since Dostoyevsky is only one of seventeen authors named, and it would be hard indeed to plead Salinger’s affinity with, say, Jane Austen or Burns, except perhaps in regard to their common mastery of the spoken word. In the case of Dostoyevsky, however, there is other and more cogent evidence of his particular importance to Salinger. Twice within his short stories there are direct references to Dostoyevsky. In “The Last Day of the Last Furlough” Sergeant Babe Gladwaller chooses to spend part of that momentous day ‘with Father Zossima and Alyosha Karamazov on the portico below the monastery.’2 It seems like a memory of Babe Gladwaller’s reading when Sergeant X, in “For Esme—with Love and Squalor”, quotes from The Brothers Karamazov. In a copy of Goebbels’s Die Zeit ohne Beispiel that he finds in the room of a Nazi woman whom he had arrested he sees the inscription in German ‘Dear God, life is hell.’

Then, with far more zeal than he had done anything in weeks, he picked up a pencil stub and wrote down under the inscription, in English, ‘Fathers and teachers, I ponder “What is hell?” I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.’ He started to write Dostoyevski’s name under the inscription, but saw—with fright that ran through his whole body—that what he had written was almost entirely illegible. He shut the book.3

Evidently for both Sergeant X and Sergeant Babe Gladwaller Dostoyevsky was of special significance. And so too, it would seem, for Sergeant J. D. Salinger, as he then was, in the light of these reiterated references as well as in the light of his avowed predilection. Yet hitherto, in spite of their notorious industry in other directions, Salinger critics have hardly ventured to explore this aspect of his work. Only a few desultory comments have linked Salinger and Dostoyevsky. In a phrase that is more striking than illuminating Henry A. Grunwald has issued a warning against turning ‘Salinger into a sort of Dostoyevsky of the nursery.’4 Arthur Heiserman and James E. Miller Jr in their attempt to classify different types of quest in literature referred to Alyosha Karamazov and the Idiot5 alongside Salinger’s protagonists. But perhaps the most revealing remark is one that centres on form rather than on content. “Seymour: An Introduction”, James E. Miller Jr has astutely pointed out, ‘may be said to have the form that conceals form, with all the seeming irrelevancies deliberately designed to create an ever greater illusion of reality—the real reality (a technique, incidentally, not uncommon, as witness Dostoyevski’s Notes from Underground or Rilke’s The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge).’6 The same holds true of The Catcher in the Rye, as we shall see.

The alignment of The Catcher in the Rye alongside Notes from Underground may initially seem somewhat surprising. The distance between the two works in both period and location is certainly considerable. Almost a century stands between their respective dates of publication (1864 and 1951), just as almost half the globe divides Russia from the United States. Such external factors are, however, functionally unimportant in the comparative study of literature where works geographically and historically remote from each other are habitually juxtaposed for a reciprocal exegesis. What matters fundamentally is not the outer relationship (closeness or distance in time and space) of the elements in the comparison, but the existence of a truly organic inner link between them. I shall argue in this essay in favor of the presence of such a link between Notes from Underground and The Catcher in the Rye in regard to form as well as content. In narrative technique and in the characterization of the chief protagonist there is a substantial degree of similarity between the two works.

At first glance admittedly the central characters appear to be quite different. While Holden Caulfield is an adolescent of sixteen going

on seventeen, the former government official of Notes from Underground is a seedy forty-year-old in Part One of his narrative, though in Part Two he casts back to his crucial formative experiences at the age of twenty-four. Clearly he is more set into the mould of his personality than Holden. The author too suggests the unlikelihood of any further change in him by his final abruptly dismissive phrase: ‘He couldn’t resist and went on writing. But we are of the opinion that one might just as well stop here.’7 In Holden’s case on the other hand there would seem to be a greater potential for change, in view of his youth. The problems that he describes may represent merely one phase of his development, a temporary condition which he may outgrow or of which he may be ‘cured’ by the psychological treatment he is undergoing. He himself shows an extraordinary detachment as to his prospects, which hardly bodes well for his future: ‘A lot of people, especially this one psychoanalyst guy they have here, keeps asking me if I’m going to apply myself when I go back to school next September. It’s such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean how do you know what you’re going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don’t. I think I am, but how do I know? I swear it’s a stupid question.’8 Holden Caulfield seems here to have written himself off with a tragicomic shrug of apparent indifference in much the same way as the Underground Man.

In fact the disparity in age between the protagonists of The Catcher in the Rye and Notes from Underground, like their geographical and temporal separation, soon proves of far lesser import than the similarity of the problem with which they are grappling. Both are beset by an acute sense of alienation which becomes manifest in a whole variety of ways ranging from the familiar to the recondite. What is so striking is the parallel pattern that emerges from an analysis of their alienation despite the differences in their outer situation.

To take the most obvious facet first: both have become outsiders by the beginning of their narratives. The Underground Man has, many years ago, we are given to understand, abandoned his position as a government official. Even while he was working, his departure from the norm puzzled and ‘worried me then: I was unlike everyone else, and everyone else was unlike me. “I’m all alone while there are a lot of them” I mused’ (p. 126). Holden Caulfield too is unlike everyone else and all alone as he is ‘kicked out’ (p. 4) of Pencey Prep, the third successive school that he has left in disgrace. Both therefore stand at a remove from the social station expected of them (i.e. work and school), both moreover do so in a strange self-exclusion that is semi-voluntary. For Holden Caulfield certainly does not lack the intelligence to keep up with the academic requirements at his schools; what he does lack is the will—the will to conform. Like Holden, the Underground Man found neither satisfaction nor meaning in his job: ‘I entered the service to have something to eat (and for that only). And so, when a distant relative died, leaving me six thousand rubles, I immediately resigned’ (p. 92). Each has consciously opted out because life within the accepted framework seemed pointless.

It is here that the personal withdrawal is linked to a protest against the social system as such. The alienation of Holden Caulfield and of the Underground Man stems from their radical rejection of a social order which both perceive as hypocritical, corrupt, and basically askew. Holden’s favourite term of contempt is ‘phony.’ He sees himself surrounded by ‘phonies,’ notably in those prep schools: ‘You ought to go to a boys’ school sometime. Try it sometime,’ he tells his date, Sally Hayes. ‘It’s full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses’ (p. 131). His repeated failures at school are in effect a practical expression of his deep revulsion against the moral perversity of the code of values represented by the people he encounters there. He himself is fully aware of this:

One of the biggest reasons I left Elkton Hills was because I was surrounded by phonies. That’s all. They were coming in the goddam window. For instance, they had this headmaster, Mr Haas, that was the phoniest bastard I ever met in my life. Ten times worse than old Thurmer. On Sundays, for instance, old Haas went around shaking hands with everybody’s parents when they drove up to school. He’d be charming as hell and all. Except if some boy had little old funny-looking parents. You should’ve seen the way he did with my roommate’s parents. I mean if a boy’s mother was sort of fat or corny-looking or something, and if somebody’s father was one of those guys that wear those suits with very big shoulders and corny black-and-white shoes, then old Haas would just shake hands with them and give them a phony smile and then he’d go talk, for maybe a half an hour, with somebody else’s parents. I can’t stand that stuff. It drives me crazy. It makes me so depressed I go crazy. I hated that goddam Elkton Hills.(pp. 13-14; italics are Salinger’s)

Naive, vituperatively ad hominem though this outburst is, its indictment of the entire system is perfectly clear. Throughout his wanderings in New York after his flight from school Holden is repeatedly distressed and instantly alienated by further discoveries of ‘phoniness’ wherever he looks. He dreams of running away to Vermont with Sally Hayes for the simple, good life (p. 132), or—grotesquely yet significantly—of a total retreat from human communion into the pose of a deaf mute (p. 198). Only with small children, as yet uncontaminated by spuriousness, does he feel happily at ease. The Underground Man is as vehement as Holden Caulfield in his condemnation of the dominant social mores of his time. He abhors the self-complacent vanity of Apollon (p. 187) and is incensed by his former school-fellows’ callous worship of success (p. 146) measured primarily in terms of money and status equivalent to the Cadillac that is the symbol of achievement in The Catcher in the Rye. But this critique of the established order goes far beyond mere irritation at snobbish vacuity. He questions the very foundations of the currently accepted Weltanschauung based on a ‘scale of advantages on statistical averages and scientific formulas thought up by economists’ (p. 106). Such simplistic schematization is anathema to him for he has become convinced that the genuine values of life—whatever they may be—do not ‘fit into any scale or chart’ (p. 106). The ‘laws of logic’ are not ‘in accordance with human laws’ (p. 116). While he agrees ‘that man is a creative animal’ he is acutely conscious also of man’s fascination with ‘chaos and disorder’ (p. 116). So ‘man is a comical animal’ (p. 117) ‘doomed to strive consciously toward a goal, engaged in full-time engineering, as it were, busy building himself roads that lead somewhere—never mind where’ (p. 116; italics are Dostoyevsky’s). The implication is obviously that these roads may in fact lead nowhere, that life is a paradoxical labyrinth rather than a structured system. The paradigm of that purported system is the crystal palace, built to scales, charts, scientific formulas, and allegedly ‘indestructible’ (p. 118). It is as the incarnation of misguided rationalism that it arouses the Underground Man’s ironic scorn (pp. 118-19). Though the primary butt of his invective was, as is well-known, Chernyshevsky’s blueprint for utopia, What Is To Be Done?, the significance of his alternative reaches out far beyond this immediate target. In opposition to the restricted orderliness and artificiality of the reigning organization he defiantly proclaims his own ethos:

So one’s own free, unrestrained choice, one’s own whim, be it the wildest, one’s own fancy, sometimes worked up to a frenzy—that is the most advantageous advantage that cannot be fitted into any table or scale and that causes every system and every theory to crumble into dust on contact. And where did these sages pick up the notion that man must have something that they feel is a normal and virtuous set of wishes; what makes them think that man’s will must be reasonable and in accordance with his own interests? All man actually needs is independent will, at all costs and whatever the consequences.(p. 110; italics are Dostoyevsky’s)

This is a rampant individualism to which Holden Caulfield would willingly subscribe. Although the Underground Man’s mode of expression is more abstract and more sophisticated than Holden’s direct emotionalism, the tenor of their protest is identical: against a wrong-minded, ‘phony’ order, and for personal freedom and sincerity. Yet in spite of their deep alienation and their outspoken social criticism, neither the Underground Man nor Holden Caulfield has totally cut adrift from the community around him. Their stance is highly contradictory, torn as they are ‘between the imperative of involvement and revulsion at involvement.’9 That phrase, written about The Catcher in the Rye, is equally apposite to Notes from Underground. In both works the tension between communication and non-communication forms one of the major themes.

This is so amply evident in The Catcher in the Rye that it hardly requires much elaboration. The novel consists structurally of a series of encounters, a string of conversations or attempted conversations. Holden first discusses his situation with Old Spencer. Discounting his whimsical exchanges on the train with Mrs Morrow, his next dialogue is with Faith Cavendish who gives him short shrift. He fares hardly better with ‘the three witches’ (p. 70) from Seattle, when he tries ‘to get them in a little intelligent conversation’ (p. 73). Nor is Old Horwitz, the taxi driver, very receptive to his musings on the fate of the ducks in winter so that ‘I stopped having a conversation with him’ (p. 82). The prostitute is even less amenable to his suggestion that she ‘might care to chat for a while’ (p. 95). Things go better at last with the nuns at Grand Central Station: ‘We sort of struck up a conversation’ (p. 109), a tentative human relationship with an element of respect and liking for all its grotesque overtones. With Sally Hayes, however, Holden is back to the old obtuse non-comprehension that is the repeated response to his utterances. A ‘typical Caulfield conversation,’ old Luce calls such interchanges without specifying what he means by that phrase, though we may surmise that he is referring to Holden’s unconventional, often startling views, his flights of enthusiasm alternating with a deadpan laconicism, his disconcertingly honest probing, as well as his failure by and large to find a sympathetic hearing. Only with his sister Phoebe is there real tenderness and openness. The encounter with Mr Antolini towards the end of the novel, a parallel to that with the old schoolmaster, Spencer, at the beginning, seems to come no closer to any mutual understanding. If his interlocutors do not grasp his meaning, neither does he theirs. This ‘incommunicability’ at the core of The Catcher in the Rye, to use Charles H. Kegel’s term, is illustrated also in the fifteen attempted telephone calls, of which a mere four are completed, ‘and those with unfortunate results.’10 The very fragmentation of Holden’s speech, his frequent recourse to such apologetic approximations as ‘sort of,’ ‘and all,’ ‘I mean,’ show his ineptitude in communication. Nevertheless he does go on trying to talk to people.

So does the Underground Man. His sorties from the retreat of his mousehole represent attempts to re-establish some social contacts. Admittedly his efforts are feeble and not without an admixture of that masochistic perversity that makes him court failure throughout his life. He senses, for instance, that Simonov, a former schoolmate of his, might not welcome his company. Even so, after an interval of almost a year, he visits him because, one Thursday, he suddenly felt ‘unable to stand my loneliness’ (p. 139). It is thus a need for companionship that draws him out into a world that he hates, fears, despises, but also somehow longs for. At Simonov’s he runs into several other former schoolfellows who are planning a party, to which he invites himself by offering to contribute seven rubles like the others. Again he takes the initiative despite their evident lack of encouragement, indeed their thinly veiled rudeness. Not surprisingly in the event he is very obviously the intruder on the party: ‘I didn’t sing. All I did was try not to look at any of them. I affected a nonchalant air, waiting impatiently for them to address me first. But, alas, they didn’t. Ah, how I longed to make up with them at that moment’ (p. 156). Insults, derision, and humiliations do not deter him from following them to the house of pleasure, where he meets Liza. This is his one true opportunity for a human relationship. In place of the scorn he had reaped from his schoolfellows, from Liza he gets at least a modicum of genuine response—sufficient to induce her to call on him a few days later. But the potential evanesces because he has no warmth, no capacity for true feeling. ‘Why you’re … just like a book,’ (p. 174) Liza had already commented on their first conversation. ‘That was the only way I knew how to speak—“like a book”’ (p. 179), he concedes to himself, adding bitterly that often it ‘was so contrived and such bad literature’ (p. 200). For, as he realizes, ‘I wasn’t prompted by my heart but by my stupid head’ (p. 200) with the result that ‘I couldn’t love her’ (p. 199). Though he longs for human relationships as an escape from the lonely misery of his mousehole, he lacks the emotional generosity to sustain them.

The Underground Man is thus as torn between the poles of involvement and non-involvement, communication and non- communication, as Holden Caulfield. In their reactions to this dilemma they differ to some extent. Here more than elsewhere the divergence between them not only in age but also in background is of importance. The Underground Man, brought up, as he tells us, ‘without a family … without feelings’ (p. 170), is full of latent hatred against himself and others. His animosity culminates in his conscious cruelty to Liza, but it is manifest throughout in the venom and malice of his vitriolic outbursts. Holden Caulfield on the other hand often sounds an elegiac note in his tragic-comic jumble of emotions. He is by no means without feeling. His tenderness for little children, above all for his sister, is surely connected with his love for Ali, the younger brother who died. It is arguable that in the long run this softer streak in Holden will save him from the fate of the Underground Man, that his confinement in the asylum is only temporary. But there is no cogent evidence in the text to support these hypotheses; they are no more than hopes. And, on the contrary, under unfavourable circumstances of repeated failure and rejection Holden could eventually become as cynical as the Underground Man. Be that as it may, when we see them, both are caught in the paradox of their strong innate urge to involvement and communication, yet with a society that repels and alienates them.

The ambivalence of this situation stems in large measure from the ambiguity of their attitudes towards themselves. For self-alienation, with all its peculiar perplexities, is an essential facet of the total alienation syndrome that besets both the Underground Man and Holden Caulfield. Neither really knows himself; each is in a sense engaged in a quest for his own identity, a scrutiny of himself that of necessity entails investigation of one’s relationship to the outer world. But that in turn must inevitably remain in a disturbing state of flux if the pivotal persona is himself still floating in doubt. So the Underground Man laments that everything ‘disintegrates chemically’

(p. 103), while Holden Caulfield constantly has to confess ‘I don’t know.’

Accordingly, the search for certainty forms one of the cardinal themes of both Notes from Underground and The Catcher in the Rye. It surfaces in the recurrent preoccupation with the attainment of truth, and particularly in the dichotomy between ‘truth’ and ‘lies,’ which are envisaged not as fixities but as stages on a sliding scale that is itself, moreover, given to perturbing shifts. ‘I was lying just now’ (p. 91), the Underground Man abruptly announces after his self-introduction; ‘I’m lying like a son of a bitch’ (p. 120) he later reiterates. Are these startling assurances of deception to be taken at face value, or are they to be read as an integral part of his characteristic equivocation? There is no way of knowing for sure. Perhaps the Underground Man is playing a game (p. 179) with the reader, as with Liza and indeed with himself, in order to block out ‘the outline of the truth’ because it is ‘a sordid, obscene truth!’ (p. 200). Holden Caulfield too proclaims himself ‘the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life’ (p. 16), a contention borne out in part by his frequent lies about his age—usually in an attempt to obtain alcohol!—and his invention of alleged physical infirmities: a ‘tiny little tumor on the brain’ (p. 58), a recent operation on his ‘clavichord’ (p. 96), and a bad leg (p. 157). These comical tall tales do not seriously undermine his credibility since they serve a specific purpose in extricating him in each instance from an awkward situation. Curiously, however, it is the offer that punctuates his narrative in such profusion, namely ‘if you really want to know the truth,’ that causes a vague uneasiness in the reader. It may be simply a case of protesting too much. But as in Notes from Underground so also in The Catcher in the Rye objective criteria are hard, if not impossible, to establish because the first-person narrative in both stories strictly limits the perspective. Consequently certainty eludes protagonist and reader alike from beginning to end.

The equivocalness of the narrators is further heightened by their common tendency to escape into fantasies. Both patently delight in roles and masks that transport them from grim reality into mirages which render the self more attractive or at least more acceptable to the dreamer. The Underground Man, fully aware that he lacks ‘the guts to face reality’ (p. 148; italics are Dostoyevsky’s), envisages himself repeatedly as ‘a hero’ (pp. 136, 196), though he knows that he is only playing ‘a part to save appearances’ (p. 194). His principal wish-image is highly revealing in the light of his incapacity either to give or gracefully to receive love:

But how much love—ah, how much—I experienced in my dreams, when I escaped to ‘the sublime and the beautiful.’ Perhaps it was an imaginary love and maybe it was never directed toward another human being, but it was such an overflowing love that there was no need to direct it—that would’ve been an unnecessary luxury. Everything always ended safely in a leisurely, rapturous sliding into the domain of art, that is, into the beautiful lives of heroes stolen from the authors of novels and poems and adapted to the demands of the moment, whatever they might be. I, for instance, triumphed over everyone, and they, of course, are strewn in the dust, acknowledging my superiority; I’m all-forgiving; I’m a great poet and court chamberlain; I fall in love; I inherit millions and donate them to human causes and take advantage of this opportunity to publicly confess my backslidings and disgrace which, of course, is no ordinary disgrace but contains much that is ‘sublime and beautiful’ in it, something in the Manfred style. Everyone is weeping and kissing me (they could hardly be so thick-skinned as not to); then I leave, hungry and barefoot, to preach new ideas and rout the reactionaries at Austerlitz. Then, a triumphal march is played, an amnesty is declared, the Pope agrees to leave Rome for Brazil, there’s a ball for all of Italy at the Villa Borghese on the shores of Lake Como, which lake, for this occasion, is moved to the vicinity of Rome.(pp. 137-8)

Holden’s fantasies, the product of his vivid imagination, are even more varied and characteristically mingle the comic with the pathetic. ‘I’m an exhibitionist,’ (p. 29) he declares right at the outset before his schoolfellows as he clowns the role of governor’s son who wants to be a tap-dancer instead of going to Oxford. Later, taking his cue from ‘the goddam movies’ (p. 104), he repeatedly enjoys the fiction of himself as the guy in the shootout with a bullet in his guts, ‘a wounded sonuvabitch’ (p. 150), dripping blood all over the place until bandaged by his girl. In spite of their apparent adolescent crudeness these dreams express the same craving for attention and affection as the more literary and sophisticated ones of the Underground Man. In both instances, moreover, the alienated outsider in search of himself and of his place is at one and the same time nurturing a more glamorous self-image and pleading for loving attention from others. This tendency to take refuge in fantasies is but another manifestation of that misrelationship to the inner self as well as to the outer world that equally typifies the Underground Man and Holden Caulfield. A fundamental disruption of the normal responses is at the root of their aberrant and paradoxical behaviour patterns; hence that constant, puzzling ambivalence, that alternation between an alienated rejection of society and latent longing for involvement, between withdrawal and attempted communication, between self- alienation and the quest for identity.

These outward symptoms of disorientation point to a pair of personalities of striking similarity in spite of the differences in their ages, situation and surroundings. For both the Underground Man and Holden Caulfield are, as the former perceives himself, men of ‘heightened consciousness’ (p. 96), or more precisely, of heightened self-consciousness. They are in the grip of an exaggerated self- awareness, and what is more, they tend to see themselves in a dualistic vision that verges on the schizophrenic. It is this that leads to that characteristic set of tensions which dominate their existence and which repeat in their attitudes towards themselves that same ambiguity that bedevils their relationships to others. The Underground Man and Holden Caulfield alike oscillate between solipsism and irony, hope and indifference, the grotesque humour of detachment and the bitterness of lost illusions. The underlying conflict is between the self-esteem that devolves from their proud sense of their own pre-eminence over the average man in intellect and sensitivity on the one hand, and on the other the self-denigration that drives them masochistically to magnify their physical defects and almost gloat over their failures. ‘I’m a highly developed, civilized man! … I’m a well-educated, sophisticated man’ (p. 183), the Underground Man assures himself at one moment; yet, he had previously introduced himself with these words: ‘I’m a sick man … a mean man. There’s nothing attractive about me’ (p. 90). Holden too seems veritably to enjoy belittling himself as he confesses: ‘I have no wind, if you want to know the truth. I’m quite a heavy smoker’ (p. 5) and tells us: ‘I’d only been in about two fights in my life, and I lost both of them. I’m not too tough’ (pp. 45-6; italics are Salinger’s). But his contempt for the ‘morons’ (p. 84), the ‘jerks’ (p. 85), and of course those notorious ‘phonies’ he sees all around him surely suggests a certain confidence in his own superiority. Holden’s combination of individualistic self-assertion with pervasive self-doubt runs largely parallel to that of the Underground Man. Dostoyevsky and Salinger have drawn masterly portraits of figures tortured by a series of uncertainties that threaten to shatter their egos and their whole universe in a maelstrom of bewilderment.

These extensive similarities between the protagonists of Notes from Underground and The Catcher in the Rye are backed by the far-reaching likeness of literary presentation and narrative technique. While there are arguably a fair number of other characters in the literature of the past hundred years who share certain features with the Underground Man, in no case is the parallelism of form as well as of content as consistent as in this instance.

Both works are cast in the form of a first-person narration that draws on the tradition of the confessional novel. The cues that the Underground Man gives us—half ironically—to his tale: ‘a chatterbox’ (p. 104), ‘my babble’ (p. 92), ‘I’ll talk about myself’ (p. 93)—these are just as applicable to Holden Caulfield. The dominant manner in each case is that of colloquial expression, ranging in tone from half-whispered intimacy to shrill hysteria. As Carl F. Strauch has pointed out, The Catcher in the Rye ‘moves effortlessly on the colloquial surface and at the same time uncovers, with hypnotic compulsion, a psychological drama of unrelenting terror and final beauty.’11 That comment holds equally true of Notes from Underground.

What is more, the author is in both stories absent from the actual narrative, apart from Dostoyevsky’s opening footnote and his brief final comment which really act as an extraneous framework. Salinger, like Dostoyevsky, remains completely hidden behind the persona who carries the story along single-handed and independently as it were. No voices other than his are heard, except in reportage, and that through his perception. This undoubtedly fosters a strong sense of intimacy between the persona and the reader. Indeed the chief protagonist in both Notes from Underground and The Catcher in the Rye faces the reader repeatedly throughout the story, speaking to him directly. Holden begins his tale with these words: ‘If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth’ (p. 1). That reiterated ‘you’ in the leitmotif phrase ‘if you want to know the truth’ and also elsewhere punctuates Holden’s account of himself. The Underground Man reinforces his use of ‘you’ by the formal address ‘ladies and gentlemen’: ‘Now I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, whether you like it or not’ (p. 93). Like Holden’s ‘you,’ that ‘ladies and gentlemen’ recurs frequently. Obviously this technique leads in both works to an acute involvement of the reader through the establishment of a straight link between the persona and the reader as speaker and listener. There is a very real feeling of immediacy and of contact which must surely be linked with the protagonists’ urge to communicate.

On the other hand, for all its vividness this manner of narration does raise certain problems, and they are identical for Notes from Underground and The Catcher in the Rye. Firstly, the question as to the putative audience remains unanswered. Who are the ‘ladies and gentlemen’ that the Underground Man is apostrophizing? Who is, or are, Holden’s ‘you’? There is little internal evidence in either case. The Underground Man at least tells us that he is writing because ‘I’m bored with constantly doing nothing’ and also because ‘I feel that if I write it down, I’ll get rid of it’ (p. 123). The same subconscious desire for catharsis may be impelling Holden, or he may even have been encouraged into this self-outpouring in the course of the psychological treatment he is undergoing. But that is mere conjecture. His confession is more plainly oral not only in its phraseology but also in the emphasis on such words as ‘hear’ (p. 1) and ‘tell’ (p. 213), whereas the Underground Man’s is purportedly a written document. The audience, however, is in both cases unidentified, and hence a part of the puzzle; and that perplexity is intensified by a corollary of the first-person mode of Notes from Underground and The Catcher in the Rye, namely the limitation of the viewpoint that inevitably follows from narration by a single person without authorial intervention. Lacking outside correctives and objective criteria either from the author or from other characters, the reader must perforce adopt the persona’s own perspective. This in turn, of course, serves to heighten the reader’s involvement, in this instance to draw him in both works ever more deeply into the protagonists’ gnawing uncertainties.

In structure too similarities exist between Notes from Underground and The Catcher in the Rye. Both use the device of a retrospective framework in which the protagonist looks back on his life up to that point. The Underground Man begins his review at the age of forty and goes back later to incidents that had occurred when he was twenty-four. Holden’s time-span, in keeping with his youth, is much shorter, but he also is retracing bygone events. Both, moreover, undertake their excursions into the past from a kind of retreat: the Underground Man’s metaphoric mousehole, and the institution ‘out here’ (p. 1) where Holden is presumably hospitalized. From the temporary safety of these refuges each recalls his successive encounters with the reality of the outer world: the Underground Man’s confrontation with the burly policeman, his reunion with his schoolfellows, and his meetings with Liza correspond to the whole series of assorted people that Holden runs into at his schools and during his adventures in New York. Different though they are in actual content, their respective encounters are in the last analysis analogous in their abrasive effect. The outline of both works is circular insofar as the protagonists arrive back at the end in time and space to their starting-points. But the inner movement is surely that of a downward spiral: the Underground Man has sunk irredeemably into his mousehole while Holden Caulfield appears to have regressed into that childhood which he idealizes. The ending of both works is completely open, hanging abruptly, indeed startlingly in the air. In Notes from Underground, as in The Catcher in the Rye, the final impression is of ‘a combination of nightmare and burlesque where horror and comedy mix in inexplicable fashion.’12

What conclusions may be drawn then from this multifaceted, far-reaching parallelism between Notes from Underground and The Catcher in the Rye? It is obviously tempting to posit an influence of Dostoyevsky on Salinger, particularly in the light of Salinger’s avowed predilection for the Russian novelist and his repeated references to his writings. Influence is a slippery concept, difficult to prove with any conclusiveness. What is more, Salinger’s well-known personal reticence deprives us largely of the letters and diaries which often provide helpful clues and documentation in the case of other writers. Yet given the massive internal evidence it seems not imprudent at least to conjecture the likelihood of such an influence.

But the affinity between Notes from Underground and The Catcher in the Rye also leads to more important conclusions and in an area less tentative than that of influence: namely in regard to Salinger’s place in literary tradition. Critics have tended to site him predominantly within the American framework. The most common comparison by far has been to Huck Finn13 as one of the Good Bad Boys of American literature, to use Leslie Fiedler’s14 telling phrase. Other filiations have been drawn too, to Gatsby15 or Redburn16 for instance, and Holden naturally always features prominently in studies of the adolescent in American fiction.17 Some attempts have indeed been made to investigate aspects of Salinger’s European background, notably his interest in Kierkegaard18

19 20

and his links to the Romantics. In France he has been presented as ‘un Alain Fournier américain’ because Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes is a novel of adolescence like The Catcher in the Rye. ‘Holden is observed to keep company not only with Huck Finn but also with Ulysses, Aeneas, Ishmael, Alyosha, Stephen Dedalus and Hans Castorp,’ Arthur Heiserman and James E. Miller Jr point out21—somewhat tantalizingly since the thesis is not fully explored. Indeed it is Miller himself who has insisted most emphatically that ‘in spite of this wide scattering of interest and attractions, Salinger is not a Zen Buddhist, or a philosopher or a poet. He is an American novelist writing in the American tradition.’22 The confession of Buddy Glass in “Zooey” that The Great Gatsby was his Tom Sawyer when he was twelve reveals, according to Miller, Salinger’s ‘fundamental affinity for the native tradition.’23 This is incontestable. But Salinger’s own confession: ‘I love Kafka, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Proust, O’Casey, Rilke, Lorca, Keats, Rimbaud, Burns, Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, Henry James, Blake, Coleridge’ shows a writer whose literary horizons extended beyond The Great Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn. Without denial of Salinger’s deep American roots, his place in a wider literary lineage should be acknowledged. The comparison of Notes from Underground to The Catcher in the Rye shows that Holden Caulfield represents not merely the American adolescent but also a prime example of the anti-hero as he has evolved on both sides of the Atlantic from Dostoyevsky’s seminal portrait. As a classic of modern sensibility The Catcher in the Rye must be read alongside such works as Notes from Underground, Sartre’s Nausea, Camus’ The Stranger, Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno. Salinger’s imagination, while drawing on the native American context, rises to universal humanistic truths in his brilliant evocation of a characteristic figure. It is this that accounts for his extraordinary impact and his lasting appeal.

Notes

1. William Maxwell, ‘J. D. Salinger,’ Book of the Month Club News, Midsummer 1951, 5-6

2. Saturday Evening Post, ccxvii (15 July 1944), 26

3. J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories (Boston: Little, Brown and Company 1948, 5th ed. 1953), 160

4. Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait, introduced and edited by Henry Anatole Grunwald (New York: Harper and Brothers 1962), xiii

5. Arthur Heiserman and James E. Miller Jr, ‘Some Crazy Cliff,’ in Grunwald, ed., Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait, 196-7

6. James E. Miller Jr, J. D. Salinger, Pamphlets on American Writers, No. 51 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1965), 42

7. F. Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (New York: Signet 1961), 203. All subsequent references are to this edition.

8. J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (New York: Bantam Books 1964), 213. All subsequent references are to this edition.

9. Miller, J. D. Salinger, 13

10. Charles H. Kegel, ‘Incommunicability in Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye,’ Western Humanities Review, xi (Spring 1957), 188-90

11. Carl F. Strauch, ‘Kings in the Back Row: Meaning through Structure. A Reading of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye,’ Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 2 (Winter 1961), 5

12. Miller, J. D. Salinger, 9

13. See Charles Kaplan, ‘Holden and Huck: The Odyssey of Youth,’ College English, xviii (November 1956), 76-80; Arvin Wells, ‘Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield: The Situation of the Hero,’ Ohio University Review, ii (1960), 31-42; Levi A. Olan, ‘The Voice of the Lonesome: Alienation from Huck Finn to Holden Caulfield,’ Southwest Review, 48 (Spring 1963), 143-50; Edgar Branch, ‘Mark Twain and J. D. Salinger: A Study in Literary Continuity,’ American Quarterly, ix (Summer 1957), 144-58

14. ‘The Eye of Innocence,’ in No! In Thunder: Essays on Myth and Literature (Boston: Beacon Press 1966), 251-91

15. Mario L. D’Avanzo, ‘Gatsby and Holden Caulfield,’ Fitzgerald Newsletter, 38 (1966), 4-6

16. Robert L. Gale, ‘Redburn and Holden—Half Brothers One Century Removed,’ Forum, iii (Winter 1963), 32-6

17. See Frederic I. Carpenter, ‘The Adolescent in American Fiction,’ English Journal, 46 (September 1957), 313-19; Ihab Hassan, ‘The Idea of Adolescence in American Fiction,’ College English, xxi (December 1959), 140-6; W. Tasker Witham, The Adolescent in the American Novel 1920-1950 (New York: Ungar 1964)

18. William Wiegand, ‘Salinger and Kierkegaard,’ Minnesota Review, v (1965), 137-56

19. Carl F. Strauch, ‘The Romantic Background,’ Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, iv (Winter 1963), 31-40. See also Strauch, ‘Kings in the Back Row,’ 29

20. Robert Kanters, ‘Le mysterè Salinger—un Alain Fournier américain?’ Figaro Littéraire, xvi (11 November 1961), 2

21. ‘Some Crazy Cliff,’ 196-7

22. Miller, J. D. Salinger, 44

23. Ibid.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2015 Gale, Cengage Learning Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Furst, Lilian R. "Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye." Contemporary Literary Criticism,

edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 378, Gale, 2015. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1100119517/LitRC?u=mill30389&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=b1ac9371. Accessed 11 July 2021. Originally published in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue canadienne de littérature comparée, vol. 5, 1978, pp. 72-85.

Gale Document Number: GALE|H1100119517