Tache Finale Littérature Etrangère "Le Je/Jeu de l'auteur"

I decided to link the three documents i’ve chosen with the notion of The I of The Writer - the I Writing As A Game. First of all, there’s a play on words between I first person narrative and eye body part which foreshadows the liberty of the writers’ writing in those extracts. Moreover, the I of the writer refers to autobiographies or a first person narrative. The first document I chose is an extract from the Catcher in the Rye. This novel was written by the famous war novelist J.D. Salinger in 1951. The second one is Jack Kerouac’s best known novel On the Road, who’s also one of the most representative novel of the Beat Generation, written in 1957. And finally the front cover of « Walden or Life in the Woods » written by the american philosopher and novelist Henry David Thoreau. We can ask ourselves to what extend can we bring those three documents closer together? Firstly we will see how the first person narrative and the main characters let us compare those documents and then why their tones differentiates them.

We can say first that these three documents are linked with the notion. In fact, the writers express themselves with a first person narrative which creates less distance between the narrator and his reader but also play on words. In The Catcher in the Rye for example, we can observe the homonym « Mr Haas » which can make people smile or a comparison in On the Road line 15-16 « I felt like a speck on the surface of the sad red earth ». The two main characters also faces loneliness. Sal in Kerouac’s novel walks alone in Denver’s streets during the entire extract while Holden in the Catcher in the Rye left his home and his college to escape the oppressive reality which surrounded him. On « Walden or Life in the Woods » cover, we can also observe this loneliness by this isolated cabin the woods where the narrator stayed alone for 2 years, 2 months and two days. Kerouac and Salinger both criticizes hypocrisy through their character which can be seen with the expression « phony » repeated several times in Salinger’s novel. Thoreau does the same in his own way; as a transcendentalist, he believes that the society and its institutions corrupted the purity of the individual as we can see with the sentence written down the cover « I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up ». We can also say that Sal, Holden and Thoreau are crossing a certain form of identity crisis even if they’re different one to another; Holden doesn’t want to become an adult while Sal is looking for a new lifestyle and Thoreau escapes from his daily life to find what it means to live.

On another side, the tones’ difference show the differents states of minds and personalities of the mains characters. In fact, there is a dark atmosphere which comes from On the Road that is remarquable by the gloomy vocabulary with the repetition of « sad » and « dark » and terms like « depression » l.17 or « die » l.62. This reveals the désillusion of Sal’s character while Thoreau wants to share an optimistic vision of the richness and fullness of his life at Walden Pond. On his side, Holden in Salinger’s novel is angry as we can see the most familiar language used with the word « bastard » l.5 or « goddam » l.20 for exemple which show his irritation. Sal also wants

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