Reflections on Existential Nihilism in J. D.

Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Dostoevsky’s

Notes From Underground

_______________

Mikkel Guldager
MA in English, University of Copenhagen, BA in Philosophy, San Diego State University
Ph.d. in English Philology at Freie University, Berlin (ad interim)
 2

Existential Nihilism: Interrelated Paradigms in Salinger and Dostoevsky

“Of course I have myself made up all the

things you say. That, too, is from underground.
I have been for forty years listening to you
through a crack under the floor.”1

Long before Salinger would start thinking about Holden Caulfield and his endeavors of trying to be

a catcher in the rye, many of the prominent ideas which Holden gets to represent were already

pondered upon in the darkness of the mind of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. In his meta-parable,

his fundamental apologia Notes From Underground, Dostoevsky explores and deconstructs what

exogenously dictates the idea of a deviant; a madman as a construct of the bourgeois capitalistic

society. Clinging to these ideas and after a brief review of the two works, it will be elucidated how

Salinger, who certainly was inspired by Dostoevsky’s writings,2 carries forward the continuum of

the Dostoevskyan madman in his quest on the realms of a postmodern society. With ideas deriving

from Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, Holden Caulfield and the Underground Man will be

analyzed not in relation to their “inner organic link”3 but to the society that encircles and defines

them. It will be discussed whether they can be classified as mad (subaltern) subjects or not; and

moreover the essay will accentuate the idea about how a discursive subjectification disentangles

power from the very bourgeois hierarchical society that delineates the subjects in question.

Foucauldian and Lacanian taxonomies will be used along with Spivak’s terminology concerning her

dogmatic principles about subaltern studies in order to map out the power of madness.

1
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground and The Grand Inquisitor, [1864], selection, translation and
introduction by Ralph E. Matlaw, (New York: Penguin: 1960), 36.
2
Lilian R. Furst, “Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye”, accessed via
University of Alberta Libraries Journal Hosting from
<http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/crcl/article/viewFile/2342/1737>, 72. Furst notices that Salinger in
an interview in 1951 expressed his admiration for a limited number of authors. Among these was Dostoevsky.
3
Ibid.
 3

“I am a sick man. I am a wicked man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts,”4

whispers the Underground Man, one of literature's most significant antiheros, to a camera on his

messy little desk placed in a corner on the stage. Exactly 100 years before Jean-Paul Sartre won the

Nobel Prize in literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky published a work that ignited what would soon after

coin the existentialist discourse. Notes From Underground, the title of Dostoevsky’s delicate

novella, was widely criticized because it rejected socialist utopianism. On the other hand, the work

got to inspire thinkers and writers such as Nietzsche, Emerson, Strindberg and many others. A

former clerk who has defiantly withdrawn from the corrupt outside world, our narrator wages his

own personal war on everything and everyone around him. Notes From Underground is his

passionate, obsessive, and contradictory confession which propound his polemical views.

After having read the novella twice, I expected everything and nothing when I entered La

Jolla Playhouse to see the theatrical version of the Notes. I was about to witness a production, which

began at Yale Repertory Theatre last year, that in the press had been recognized as “a frighteningly

sharp theatricalization”5 of Dostoevsky’s work. As does the novella, the play literally comes within

a striking range of the spectators. The stage is placed immediately in front of the first row and

submerged so that the performers and the audience are at eye level. The effect is stunning and

intense, and sitting on the first row you can almost feel the breaths of the Underground Man as he

blazes his soliloquy.

The Underground Man’s inner and outer reality are thus unfeigned. This beautifully

underpins the double reality of the narrative, as do the projections of the Man on the back wall

which are at once solitary confessions and a self-(un)conscious performance. What the play seems

4
Dostoevsky, 3.
5
Charles McNulty, Theater review: 'Notes From Underground' at La Jolla Playhouse, L.A. Times, Sep. 26, 2010,
accessed from <http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/09/theater-review-notes-from-underground-at-la-
jolla-playhouse.html> on December 13, 2010.
 4

to advocate at last, before a sudden, devastating darkness at once falls upon the stage and the

audience, is that while society may shape individuals, the individual cannot solely rely on external

influences to fill the void of a purposeless and meaningless life. A fading yellow light creeps in on

the state, subtly, and the snow turns faintly yellow. Then darkness. Silence. This reverberates

Dostoevsky as well as all existentialist credos; seeing it on stage does not blow one over in the gale,

but neither is it supposed to. It merely lowers a roaring darkness upon you; a darkness that stands as

metonymy for the revolutionary spirits of suppressed Soviets by the thousands, many more than the

40,000 who, as history has it, showed up at Dostoevsky’s funeral.

In what I will argue is Salinger’s respond to the Underground Man, The Catcher in the Rye,

we follow the protagonist, the quasi-entwicklungshero Holden Caulfield, as he looks back on what

caused the “madman stuff”6 that led to his institutionalization at what appears to be an asylum.

Holden is a preserving but alienated adolescent who can not fit in with the phony society which

constantly demanded adaptation from Holden’s side. Setting off “the day [he] left Pencey Prep,”7

Holden continuously rejects conformity and perceives society as hostile, full of “phonies coming in

the window.”8 As he wanders around in the wasteland of New York City, he encounters one

‘phony’9 after another, and his melancholia caused by the misconception of him as a subject and the

society around him eventually accumulates to an extent that results in his ultimate break down and

consecutive institutionalization.

Furthermore we experience how he is, limited by his cainotophobia, maneuvering around in

a world that does not concurrently accept Holden as he is. The world wants to alter, to conform and

6
Dostoevsky, 1.
7
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, (New York, Boston, London: Little Brown and Company, 1951), 1.
8
Ibid., 141.
9
Salinger has 49 references in Catcher where Holden refers primarily to other people being either “phony,” “phonier,”
“phoniest,” or “phonies.”
 5

to form the subject. Holden, in contrast, questions and doubts everything and refuses to transform

into a phony. Some of the most classical and perpetual scenes are the ones where Holden questions

about where the ducks from Central Park go when the pond freezes to ice. Nobody can answer this

rather simple question which, metaphorically, obviously has a deeper meaning. What Holden wants

to know is of course where one goes when it is time to leave adolescence and grow up; where do

you go when what has been habitual to you freezes over? Holden fears that the final destination

inevitably is the normative phony world around him.

We thus have an adolescent subject vivacious in desperation and only capable of loving a

dead brother, Allie, or his ten-year-old sister Phoebe. As Harald Bloom points out, Holden is “on

the verge, but [always with] the verge of madness.”10 He moves in the liminal space between two

discourses as will be studied further later on. Characterized by being a pathological but also

‘reliable’ liar11 and by his characteristic red hunting cap that he indefatigably wears, he encounters

several ambassadors from this phony world throughout the novel. He fails to connect with all of

them despite attempts on doing so. Among the people he comes across are Mr. Antolini, one of

Holden’s former professors, who informs Holden that he fears that “[Holden] is … for a terrible

fall.”12 At the end of the novel, Holden loses and then regains contact to Phoebe, and after their

reconciliation Salinger emphasizes that Holden is almost relived and back to normal:

10
Harald Bloom, Holden Caulfield, introduction by Harold Bloom, (London: Chelsea House, 2005), 2.
11
He tells “sheer lies” (16), lets us know he is a “terrific liar” (ibid.), and tells a girl he loves her which is “a lie” (124).
Moreover he lies about having a brain tumor. “Once [he] get[s] started, [he] can go on for hours if [he] feel[s] like it.
No kidding. Hours.” (52; italics are Salinger’s).
12
Salinger, 186.
 6

Boy, it began to rain like a bastard … I got pretty soaking wet, especially
my neck and my pants. My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of
protection, in a way; but I got soaked anyway. I didn't care, though. I felt
so damn happy all of sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around
and around. I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want
to know the truth. I don't know why. It was just that she looked so
damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat
and all. God, I wish you could've been there.13

The quote above tells us much about Holden, but also about the world that surrounds him. As will

be analyzed on later on, the world perceives Holden as ‘mad’. What Holden faces when he sees old

Phoebe spinning on the carousel could thus in terms of Foucault’s discoveries be the world coping

with madness; Phoebe spinning “ as the sufferer on the rotary machine, which was set at an

increasingly rapid movement … to centrifuge [madness].”14 Wearing his hunter cab, his ‘madman

stigmata’, Holden retires himself from catharsis and purification, it seems. However, we learn on

the few pages that “this was before [he] got sick”15 and sent to the asylum. Hence there is a

metaleptical gap in the narrative between Holden’s appeasement with Phoebe and his apparent

breakdown.

Metaleptical gaps are also frequent in Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. Through his

long monologue, the eccentric and deeply sarcastic Underground Man produces a rallying cry for

being heard despite he lets us know we as readers must “be irritated by all [his] babble.”16 The

ambiguous dichotomies in his narrative are ubiquitous and often paradoxical; however this is

obviously done eloquently and deliberately to Dostoevsky’s credit. The self claimed spiteful

13
Ibid., XX.
14
Michel Foucault, Madness & Civilization, A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, (New York: Random House,
1965), 177.
15
Salinger, 213.
16
Dostoevsky, 86.
 7

Underground Man is also, as Holden, playing with us in terms of reliability. He thus craftily states

that he “was lying when [he] said [he] was a spiteful officer, … lying out of spite.”17 What he “lies

and babbles about” are in fact rather simple themes; themes which have always occupied

philosophers into deep, reflective pondering.

The Underground Man so ponders about and opposes himself in indignation at nihilism,

materialism, science, progression, reason, and individualism. He blazes that by believing in these

concepts man is reduced to merely “a stop in an organ.”18 No way that can happen, the

Underground Man says: “men are still men and not piano keys.”19 The mind, thus, must and can not

be arranged and organized as neatly as science wishes, in contrast man is irrational and takes action

on behalf of unconscious feelings, caprices and boredom and often in conflict with own interests.

What is more, he supports his theory by stating that his opponents are of the opinion that man needs

nothing more than “a rational advantageous choice.”20

The book is divided into two parts. First part follows the Underground Man at forty years

old as he broods over existential issues from his cave. Part II looks back on the Underground Man

when he was a 24 years old melancholic government bureaucrat. In part I, deep down under the wet

snow of St. Petersburg from a basement where one only goes to fetch provisions for existential

philosophy, the former collegiate assessor takes us down on a visit to see how an alienated eccentric

gets by with a little help from a small fortune of 6,000 Rubles bequeathed to him by an ancestor.

Essential in his bizarre lifestyle is that he exerts free will while he bursts out objections to his

17
Ibid., 4.
18
Ibid., 25.
19
Ibid., 29.
20
Ibid., 24.
 8

opponents’ radical views that unreservedly reject the very same free will.21 The Underground Man

thus chooses the former, he wants to “kick over all that rationalism at one blow, scatter it to the

winds, just to send these logarithms to the devil, and to let us live once more according to our own

foolish will!”22 Finding pleasure in such things as a toothache, the urge to be alone has hence left

him completely isolated (except from ‘the Old Woman, his servant), taking pleasure in pain and

carrying out suppositions for the sake of the argument exclusively.

As he looks backward to his gloomy youth in part II, we learn about the forces which are the

basis for the philosophy the Underground Man sermonizes to his “imaginary audience”23 in part I.

With no exceptions, his encounters with persons from the ‘outside world’ end unsuccessfully.24

Most prominent are his encounters with coworkers, with his former classmates, his former boss

Anton Antonych Setochkin, and the prostitute Liza.

Consequently, both Holden Caulfield and the Underground Man are, to some extent

deliberately, alienated from the society that surrounds them. It is, however, significant to notice that

Holden time and again attempts to make contact the ‘phony’ world around him despite the fact that

he despises the very same thing he makes overtures to. Lillian R. Furst notices that Holden’s

“incommunicability … is illustrated in the fifteen attempted telephone calls, of which merely four

are completed.”25 The Underground Man does not do much better, he admits that he at twenty-four

“resembled no one else … [and was] alone and they [were] every one.26 This alienation is to a large

21
Moreover, opponents, as Chernyshevsky (in his essay What Is To Be Done? [1862]) in particular, rejected the not
only the existence of a free will but also the existence of God and in that sense morality.
22
Dostoevsky, 36.
23
Ibid., 37.
24
That is, the encounters do not lead to any forms of relationships. They do, however, work efficiently in a constructive
manner for the Underground Man whose philosophical minds precisely feeds from these brief acquaintances.
25
Furst, op. cit., 77.
26
Dostoevsky, 41; italics are Dostoevsky’s.
 9

extent what causes Holden and the Underground Man respectively to “fantasize”27 and to ponder

over reality. This, of course, is not unusual. Yet the fact that they both refuse to fit in, to conform to

the invisible mechanisms that make society function characterizes both as unaccommodating

subjects. Holden drops out of one school after the other, the Underground Man isolates himself and

indulges himself in arbitrary eccentricities.

This deviant nature, Michel Foucault ascertains, has since the very beginning of the fifteenth

century resulted in precautions taken by society. Deviants have never been tolerated because they

threaten the “natural order of society.”28 They were and are categorized as madmen. Now, this

taxonomy is far from a stable, fixed size. As Foucault explores, madness has been subservient to

and silenced by different definitions and taxonomies throughout history. In the High Middle Ages,

lepers were wiped out and soon after in the Renaissance “poor vagabonds, criminals, and ‘deranged

minds’ would take the part played by the leper”29 The “ships of fools”30 were launched, loaded with

madmen who were evacuated off shore. The Great Confinement followed where houses of

confinement proliferated in Europe and the madmen, societal deviants, were little by little

‘institutionalized’ to confinement. These “institutions of morality”31 clearly emphasized the balance

between civil order and divergent subjects. Walls now encircled the deviant and punishment could

not be escaped. One would be forced to the “myth of social happiness,”32 no matter the price.

Reason reigned over unreason and madness in a world where “order [was] adequate to virtue.”33

27
Furst, op. cit., 80. Elaborate.
28
This is also, from another different but interesting perspective, elaborated upon by Herbert Spencer and his idea that
“governmental interference in the “natural” order of society weakens society by wasting the efforts of its leadership in
trying to defy the laws of nature.”
29
Foucault, op. cit., 7.
30
The Narrenschiff to which Foucault dedicates his first chapter of Madness & Civilization, op. cit.
31
Ibid., 60.
32
Ibid., 63.
33
Ibid.
 10

Foucault thus deconstructs the idea of madness and argues that madness despite losing its power

which signifies the limits of social order holds a valuable productivity. He goes on and suggests that

suggests that “madness is found in the absence of the oeuvre; where there is oeuvre, there is no

madness—only suffering.”34

Despite the time span of almost four centuries, this discourse very much reverberates in both

the world of the Underground Man and that of Holden Caulfield. The former however finds himself

in this marginal in-betweeness at ease. Only from this marginalized position can he fully exert free

will and as he puts it: “show [his] power.”35 Only from his mouse hole, withdrawn from civility and

the hegemonic, panoptical society can one be free, the Underground Man suggests. Holden

Caulfield is yet not in the same position, but as will be argued in a liminal position. Holden moves

around in the world of phonies which he loathes and in which he sets out on his irrational journey.

Feeling more and more “depressed,”36 and at some points he even wishes he “was dead.”37 This is

emblematic for what eventually catches up with Holden and gets him “sick and all.”38 Hitherto, we

have experienced how Holden has been a misfit in the world, and how he cannot really let go his

adolescent innocence and become and adapted adult. The result is that Holden wanders between the

discourse of free will and that dictated for and by the postmodern hegemonic society. While he

seems disempowered, wandering in the liminal actually empowers him discursively.

Thus one may question what it is that causes this madness, this deviant behavior in both the

Underground Man and in Holden. What makes them respectively “a sick man”39 and “sick and

34
James Hollis, Review: "History of Madness" by Michel Foucault, retrieved from
<http://www.cgjungpage.org/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=871> on Monday, December 13, 2010.
35
Ibid., 113.
36
Salinger, 90.
37
Ibid., 89.
38
Ibid., 213.
39
Dostoevsky, 3.
 11

all?”40 First of all, let us point out that they are only sick or mad because they have been diagnosed

or rendered so by the established authorities; i.e. the dominant discourse. They are in that sense

deviants and perhaps most of all rebels who refuse to accommodate themselves to their

surroundings. Therefore they are “beset by an acute sense of alienation which becomes manifest in

a whole variety of ways.”41 They ‘merely’ lack the will to conform seen from the perspective of the

panoptical hegemony and are thus punished accordingly by being expelled and institutionalized

respectively.

Both insist on not changing themselves. Holden’s notorious cainotophobia is also well

depicted in the Underground Man who at the end of his tale “could not resist [writing notes from

underground] and hence continues writing them.”42 While Holden wants to restore innocence and

save children from falling of the cliff into the supremacy of the capitalistic society, the

Underground Man in his inept manners tries to save Liza – but fails. However, this is only

significant to the point where it adds emphasis to their “radical rejection of society,”43 a society

which leaves you two options: conform or be expelled/institutionalized (depending on where and

when you live). As we see in both works, by far the most chose the former: to conform.

This is further accentuated by the Lacanian idea about split subjects. Basic Lacanian

philosophy hence clarifies that the subject is the subject of the signifier as well as there is no subject

without language. These ideas about the subject restating in the language of structuralist linguistics

that it is “a split subject … not only insofar as - Freud dixit – it has consciousness and an

40
Salinger, 90.
41
Furst, 74.
42
Dostoevsky, 122.
43
Furst, 75.
 12

unconsciousness”44 are prevalent in both works. Tentatively, this means that one of the subjects’

strata is formed discursively by the signifier; in relation to Holden and the Underground Man, these

strata are thus formed by the hegemonic society. Subject formation is significant because it shows

us exactly what it is that our two narrators are up against. Furthermore it explains to a great extent

why both novels are written in first person perspective: Lacan thus distinguishes fundamentally

between “the ego or ‘moi’/’me’ and the subject intimated by the shifter ‘je’/’I’45 where the former

represents the conscious and the latter the unconscious.

Mainly the Underground Man almost makes a fuss of highlighting that there is power in the

unconscious and that “suffering is the sole origin of consciousness … [and] that consciousness is

the greatest misfortune for man, yet [he] know[s] man prizes it and would not give it up for any

satisfaction.”46 Holden, “the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life,”47 speaks of the same but in

a different terminology. Holden disdains the very signifier, society, which is ‘phony’ and pestered

with phonies. The situation, according to Holden, is so grave that you would not even know if “you

weren't being a phony.”48 What Holden raises a question about here is actually closely linked to

Lacan’s subject formation: you are codified, to a certain extent, by the world around you so you

barely know who you really are. In structuralist terms, the signifier is per se fundamental for the

signified and vice versa.

Yet there are exceptions. Not all are subjectified the same way. The deviants are not.

They are, as far as possible quasi-objectified as Foucault argues. Thus they are reduced, to some

extent, to subaltern subjects as Spivak would argue. However, Foucault sees power in this ‘art

44
“Jaques Lacan”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed from <http://www.iep.utm.edu/lacweb/> on
December 13, 2010.
45
Ibid.
46
Dostoevsky, 32.
47
Salinger, 16.
48
Ibid., 172.
 13

objectification’ because the subjects paradoxically cannot be fully objectified. They will always

have power or agency in one way or the other. As a true post-structuralist, Foucault would argue

that the agency is given through that liminal representation that he for instance himself and his

works about madness convey. Wrong, would Spivak say: the subjects must speak for themselves.

This, beyond any reasonable doubt, would both Holden Caulfield and the Underground Man vouch

for as well. Furst argues that Holden willingly, and I agree, would subscribe to the Underground

Man’s rampant individualism, even though the latter holds a more abstract and pedantic dialectics

than Holden’s:

One's own free unfettered choice, one's own caprice, however wild it may be,
one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy -- is that very "most advantageous
advantage" which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and
against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms.
And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice?
What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous
choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that
independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the
devil only knows what choice.49

The choice the Underground Man takes, as displayed, is isolation and deliberate

marginalization. From that position he exerts agency by writing these notes which when activated

by the reader become very much alive. In a Barthean way50, it is not an arbitrary aspect that the

reader completes the hermeneutic circle and fully opens up the text. This also ties up the loose ends

from Lacan and Foucault: Holden and the Underground Man break down the teleological order of

society, but only for so long that the reader gives them (or is recipient to their) agency. In that

dialectic, Foucault wins over Spivak since agency, voice and representation exists exactly for the

subaltern in that liminal space that Holden operates in. Right there is Holden’s power; as a

49
Dostoevsky, 24.
50
Cf. Roland Barthes’ essay, “The Death of the Author” (1967).
 14

discursive trespasser who challenges the phony world by, at least for a while, doubting its very

foundation for existence. The same accounts for the Underground Man who “has not totally cut

adrift from the community around him.”51 This leaves the two right where we as readers want them:

on the verge “between the imperative of involvement and revulsion at involvement.”52

To conclude, Holden and the Underground Man both advocate and live out what the truly

believe in. Free Will. The search for free will led Holden and the Underground Man to embark on a

extremely hazardous journey, a journey that comes with a price for both of them. First of all the cost

is that society stigmatizes them both as mad outsiders, as we have seen. However, this is not new,

this has been normative for centuries throughout Europe. The reason why the hegemonic society

wants to delineate deviant subjects is because they threat society’s mechanically pre-ordained order.

The order is ordained by those who control the mechanism of a capitalistic society, the hegemony.

However, both Holden and the Underground Man show us that rebellion is possible. Whether it

comes in its purest form from beneath the rumbling of economic determinism or from a liminal

position in New York City, its message is clear: there is agency and power within the marginalized

subjects. As a philosophic notion, the "Underground" thus reveals to analysis several ideas which to

philosophical understanding are fruitful and significant. In this aspect it “may be compared with

Plato's metaphor of the Cave as a rich source of reflective material.” Despite both works’ existential

wefts they seem apt to contribute to the present debate and reflection over the meaning of life: if

you do not live and exert free will, the Underground Man whispers to our minds through each and

every crack, you may as well be dead.

51
Furst, 77.
52
James E. Miller, J. D. Salinger, Pamphlets on American Writers, No. 51 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
1965), 13.
 15

Bibliography

Primary literature

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Notes From Underground and The Grand Inquisitor, [1864], selection,
translation and introduction by Ralph E. Matlaw, (New York: Penguin: 1960).

Salinger, J. D., The Catcher in the Rye, (New York, Boston, London: Little Brown and Company,
1951).

Secondary literature

Bloom, Harald, Holden Caulfield, introduction by Harold Bloom, (London: Chelsea House, 2005).

Foucault, Michel, History of Madness, ed. By Jean Khalfa, translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean
Khalfa, (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).

Foucault, Michel, Madness & Civilization, A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, (New York:
Random House, 1965).

Web sources

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Notes From Underground, E-book, accessed from

<http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-
new2?id=DosNote.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part
=all> on December 13, 2010.

Furst, Lilian R., “Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye”,
Accessed via University of Alberta Libraries Journal Hosting from
<http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/crcl/article/viewFile/2342/1737>.

Hollis, James, Review: "History of Madness" by Michel Foucault, retrieved from

<http://www.cgjungpage.org/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=871> on
Monday, December 13, 2010.

“Jaques Lacan”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed from

<http://www.iep.utm.edu/lacweb/> on December 13, 2010.

McNulty, Charles, Theater review: 'Notes From Underground' at La Jolla Playhouse, L.A. Times,
Sep. 26, 2010, accessed from <http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/09/theater-
review-notes-from-underground-at-la-jolla-playhouse.html> on December 13, 2010.

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

Salinger, J. D., The Catcher in the Rye, E-book, accessed from

<http://instructors.dwrl.utexas.edu/wiese/system/files/J.D._Salinger_-
_Catcher_In_The_Rye.pdf> on December 13, 2010.