Rebelling Against the Society and Seeking for Freedom

—— A Comparative Study on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye

Outline

Thesis statement: During every period in the history, there are always some people who feel dissatisfied with the society, and they rebel against it in order to seek for their freedom. The protagonists in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye are such figures. The behavior and feeling of them were alien to other people in the society. They couldn’t breathe in their society, so they would rather escape and seek for their own freedom. Adolescents’ growth is one of the concerns of the two novels. This thesis will focus on their rebelling against the society and seeking for freedom to get their growth.

Ⅰ．Introduction

A. Mark Twain and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

B. J. D Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye

Ⅱ．Huck and Holden’s rebelling against the society

A. Huck didn’t belong to the society.

B. Holden was regarded to be abnormal.

Ⅲ. Huck and Holden’s seeking for freedom

A. Huck escaped form the world and lived on the raft with Jim, all the way they were seeking for freedom.

B. Huck and Jim’s striving for freedom

C. Holden left school roving in New York, but he didn’t feel free until the thought of going to the West came out.

D. Holden wanted to protect the children from the world of adults, although he didn’t have so strong power.

Ⅳ. Conclusion

Rebelling Against the Society and Seeking for Freedom

—— A Comparative Study on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye

Dai Ling

School of Foreign Language, CWNU, Nanchong, China, 637002

Abstract: Huck and Holden , two adolescents who rebelled against the society , the former roved in the countryside, while the latter roved in the city. From their eyes, we could see what kind of society thy lived in, they revealed the ugliness of the society. So they rebelled against the society and went on a new route to search a bright and suitable place for themselves. Meanwhile, they not only wanted to get their own freedom, but also tried their best to help others. Huck and Holden lived in different period, yet both of them suffered from the painful conflicts between self and others, between the world of children and the world of adults, and between self and society.

Keywords: rebel, rove, freedom, conflict

Ⅰ．Introduction

A. Mark Twain and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain (1835-1910), pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, as a literary forerunner, makes great contribution to the development of American literature. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is his masterwork, the one from which, as Ernest Hemingway noted, "all modern American literature comes"(常耀信 183). This tells sufficient truth that Twain's masterpiece becomes an important starting point for a number of important American novels that follow it and holds its place as a pioneer novel.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn made no such immediate impression at the very beginning. At Concord in Massachusetts, still the Mecca of genteel New England cultural aspiration, it was banished from the local library as presenting a bad example for youth. Years later, it was blacklisted in Denver, Omaha, and even Brooklyn. When chapters from it appeared in the Century Magazine some readers found it indefensibly coarse, "destitute of a single redeeming quality" (Unger 201). Although being attacked by calumniation from various aspects, history itself has proved the life power of Huckleberry Finn as an immortal literary figure. After its publication, it has been translated into many languages and enjoyed by readers, young or old, throughout the world.

Being treated as a literary classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn receives as much criticism as one can imagine. The central issue of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is so complex that no comparable major novel has been the target of censors of manners, morals or misguided racial consciousness so persistently. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been banned from the shelves of libraries and schools throughout the United States more often than any other "classic" work in the American literary.

The critical reception of the book in the 191h century is a mixture of calumniation and praise. The hostility toward the book mainly focuses on the language it employs. The 206 times usage of the word "nigger" is sufficient for decent critics of that time to ban the book. The other shot heard round Boston's influential critical world noted in The Critic of 6 June 1885 was that the book was "irreligious". Under this overwhelming calumniation, some other men of letters consider that Huck's language and behavior show the elevation of natural American materials to the level of high art.

Other commentators call attention to the social criticism, the satire, the savagery in this book of boy adventures; to its language so clearly direct and simply natural that reasons for Hemingway's admiration for it come to mind, to its structure which is at one time or to one critic great art, at another fumbling improvisation. (Unger 201)

The book was a great success from its first publication in 1884 and has always been regarded as one of the great books of western literature and western civilization. Ernest Hemingway, H.L. Mencken, William Dean Howells, D.H. Lawrence, among other important authors, sing high praise for the novel. From the 1950s on, academic critics begin to discuss the special nature of the vernacular voice of Huck, the novel's structure, the psychology of its hero; discussion of the novel as a picaresque adventure remains an ongoing concern. Some critics like Edgar Branch compares Huck with Holden, who also arouses great dispute in literary circle. But most of the comparisons focus on the narrative pattern and characterization of the two novels.

B. J. D Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye

No decade can be captured in a single sentence, and this is true of the 1950s. The 1950s can be characterized as a time of conservative politics, economic prosperity, and social conformity. During this time, a radical writer, who spoke to a nation of young individuals and alienated youth, emerged. Jerome David Salinger (1919-)，generally referred to as J. D. Salinger, was born in 1919 to a prosperous Manhattan family and grew up in a New York City milieu. He began to publish stories in the early 1940s, and after service as an infantry sergeant in Europe during World War II he wrote more stories. His first book was The Catcher in the Rye (1951). In this book, Salinger's mixture of bright talk and brittle manners, religious quest and nervous breakdown, captured not only the perennial confusion of adolescence, but also the spiritual discomforts of an entire age. Its very origin was jumpy and uncertain; in fact, it began as a short story published in 1946 entitled "Slight Rebellion off Madison Avenue."

The short career of J.D. Salinger is quite a phenomenon in American literary history. The irony of Salinger's life is that his legend was made by seclusion. After publishing The Catcher in the Rye in 1951