J. D. Salinger's Writing Style Essay

The author J. D. Salinger has a very unique form of writing style. First and foremost the author has very long complex sentences as well as short sentences. For example the author wrote, “Once, at the Whooton School, this other boy, Raymond Goldfarb, and I bought a pint of Scotch and drank it in the chapel one Saturday night, where nobody’d see us”(Salinger 118). The author's word choice is simple because the character is only a teen in the book. For example, “They give guys the ax quite frequently at Pencey”(Salinger 7). This example is good because it is an average sentence in the book. There are not really many long and formal words in the book. I would say the author's writing is very loose and casual because he uses a lot of cuss words and very casual language. For example, “‘ I didn’t want to look like a screwball or something’”(Salinger 79). The author uses slang and dialect in the …show more content…
The people he described as phonies where acting grown up and did not act like the people he knew or he would like. When Holden would drink and smoke it represented him trying to act as if he was grown up or prove to himself he was grown up, but he wasn’t. Holden’s desire to be the catcher in the rye as a career symbolizes how he wants to stop himself and others from becoming adults. Holden liked the museum because it stayed the same every time he went to it which symbolized his desire for everything around him to stay the same. I thought the book was good, but at first I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on. I didn’t know when it started that he was in psychoanalysis. When he said his brother was picking him up in a month and then it jumped right into about how he was in school, so that's where I thought he was. Then the book and the symbols made more sense when I figured that out. All in all it was a good read, but there was a lot more cussing than I would have