Rebelliousness And Ideality: Literary Stylistic Analysis On The Catcher In The Rye

The novel The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, was written by American writer Jerome David Salinger. In the novel, Salinger adopts a teenager’s tone and depicts vividly an impressionable adolescent from a middle class family in the postwar America.Stylistics is a cross discipline combining linguistics and literature, and the literary stylistics focuses on the analysis of literature texts. Stylistic analysis is to study the stylistic effects presented by the texts. It uses appropriate linguistic instrument to describe the literary text, and interpret its thematic meaning and literary value. Although many literary reviews have contributed to the study of The Catcher in the Rye, most of which are limited to the literary or linguistic analysis, while few made researches from a perspective of literary stylistics.The thesis is based on the theory of literary stylistics and takes stylistic approaches in the research. It aims to elucidate the effects of the specific characteristics of literary language for expressing meanings and ideas by studying the stylistic features of The Catcher in the Rye. The first chapter briefly introduces The Catcher in the Rye and the style of novel. The second chapter gives a detailed research on literature stylistics and stylistic analysis. Then the literature review of The Catcher in the Rye and its writer Jerome David Salinger is presented. Chapter three is the analysis on the lexical features of the novel. It is carried out from four aspects, adjectives, clitic words, vulgarities and coined words. It can clearly identify Holden’s character through the rebelliousness in his language. Chapter four is the first-person narrative perspective. It respectively discusses the issues of the unreliable narrator, inner perspective and the nominal listener. An ambivalent psychological status of the coexistence of rebelliousness and ideality among the teenagers in the United States after World War II is revealed.The thesis aims to reveal the positive effect of a novel’s style to emphasize its theme and highlight the artistic effect. As a new perspective of analyzing literary works, stylistic analysis is practical and operable. It is suggested that the stylistic analysis should not be imprisoned in a single frame, and innovative research modes from multiple perspectives are encouraged.