Outline for Outsider Voices, Final Paper Thesis: As bildungsroman novels, A Separate Peace by John Knowles and the Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger both chart the development of young men growing up in midcentury America. In A Separate Peace, Gene’s progression from innocence into experience exemplifies American individuality, but warns of a looming masculinity crisis. In the Catcher in the Rye, Holden’s inability to mature represents the crisis’s impact on masculine identities following World War II. Section One: Comparing Holden and Gene’s stories. Holden never completes his bildungsroman, but Gene peacefully becomes a solider. What is the traditional structure of a bildungsroman story? Taken from Wikipedia (credible source?): • A bildungsroman is a genre that presents a young, sensitive protagonist who gains maturity or wisdom through education or experience. During the novel’s inception, we typically learn of a conflict between the protagonists’ values and the values of his or her society. By the novel’s conclusion, the protagonist either accepts or reevaluates society’s opposing values, and steps into maturity. How does A Separate Peace typify a bildungsroman? • Knowles introduces A Separate Peace’s protagonist, Gene, as a pliant adolescent who resents Phineas for capturing the Devon School’s attention. • Gene rejects fear, hatred and self-­‐consciousness, and replaces these emotions with self-­‐acceptance, peace, and courage. • Military service routinely signifies the transition from youthful carelessness to maturity. How does the Catcher in the Rye diverge from the bildungsroman? • Because there’s no role for Holden to step into, Holden never matures beyond the sarcastic solipsism of adolescence. • A Separate Peace clearly defined the American man’s role, but the Catcher in the Rye offers no role model for Holden to aspire to. The masculine ideal has become diffuse and indefinable. Section Two: American Men in the 1950’s What do we gain from The Lonely Crowd? David Riesman, 1950 • The rise of “other directed types,” dominating the American character. “What is common to all other-­‐directed is that their contemporaries are the course of direction for the individual – either those known to him or those with whom he is directly acquainted, through friends and through the mass media.” The other directed is a “bureaucrat, a middle man, the salaried employee.” •
•
The chief characteristic and skill of other-­‐directed types is sociability, and approval seeking behavior Riesman sees the organization man as a “rootless” and constructs an anomic picture of their lives. What do we gain from The Organization Man? William Whyte, 1956 • The vision of man as part of “a generation of bureaucrats.” “They [corporation-­‐bound college graduates] are, above all, conservative…their conservatism is passive. No cause seizes them, and nothing so exuberant or willfully iconoclastic as the Veterans of Future Wars has reappeared. There are Democrats and Republicans, and at election time there is the usual flurry of rallies, but in comparison with the agitation of the thirties no one seems to care one way or the other.” 65-­‐65 • Both Whyte and Riesman conclude their character analyses by recognizing the more social nature of their male contemporaries. “The potential leaders differ, as we have noted, from most of their neighbors. But how much do they differ? They are more the individualist than the rest of their contemporaries, but this is only a relative comparison, for the leaders’ values also indicate how very far the balance between the group and the individual has shifted….The basis of the Social Ethic is not conformity but a sense of moral imperative.” -­‐394, Whyte “We might ask, is it conceivable that these economically privileged Americans will some day wake up to the fact that they overconform? Wake up to the discovery that a host of behavioral rituals are the result, not of an inescapable social imperative but of an image of society that, though false, provides certain “secondary gains” for the people who believe in it?” -­‐372, Riesman Section Three: Reexamining Individuality in A Separate Peace and the Catcher in the Rye • Gene’s story parallels the phenomena of “other-­‐directedness” central to Riesman’s work. He gains a sense of identity and peace by integrating Phineas into his nature, and accepting maturity. For Knowles, male individuality can be drawn from contemporary, sociable representations of men.