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Example research essay topic: Means By Which Salinger Characters Pursue Happiness - 1,126 words

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... al assumption is that religion has to do with spiritual vision. And while there may be only one religious reality, this reality must be seen, even if only momentarily through various forms. In this sense he is not a Christian writer, even though there are many references to Jesus in his fiction because his historic Christianity attributes spiritual blindness to sin, not just the lack of sensitivity that Salinger repeatedly depicts. (Lundquist, 33) Zen Buddhism is the closest to Salinger's religious thought.

Zen states that truth cannot be grasped by logic, it does not mean that Zen promotes senselessness and illogic, it rather promotes logical nonsense. Salinger stories are often thought as riddles similar to Zen in which there are lots of riddles, called koan. An example of koan is seen in the preface of Nine Stories We know the sound of two hand clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?

Such riddles and illogic are visible in Teddy. For Teddy, through meditation, a square is not necessarily a square, his philosophy allows the deletion of all knowledge to achieve a greater state of consciousness. He states that in his previous incarnation he was a holy man in India. For him God was in everything and everywhere. I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all that, For him religion is the meaning of life but the society does not accept it.

I mean its very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think youre freak if you try to. My father thinks Im a freak, in a way. And my mother-well, she doesnt think its good for me to think about God all the time. She thinks its bad for my health (Teddy, 189) Teddy has achieved peace with himself, he accepted what fate brought him, he foresaw his death and did not protest against such an end. Seymour Glass in Perfect Day For Bananafish wanted to achieve peace as well.

He is on a quest to become free from all of the suffering in his life. For Seymour attaining nirvana may only be accomplished by committing suicide. Salinger shows us that when Seymour committed suicide he let go of all of the suffering that he had met, and achieved the happiness he longed for. Examples of Zen philosophy are also visible in The Catcher in the Rye Holden Caulfield has achieved his moment of enlightenment; his nirvana, in the last chapter Holden tells us "that's all I'm going to tell you" and starts asking the kind of questions which have overwhelmed him throughout the book. It seems that he has achieved some relief, and that Holden rebel will not appear in any sequel. However, we realize that Holden's quest will never finish.

Like the Buddhist cycle he has been reborn and given a new start, and we realize through this that like Holden, we have undergone a learning experience. If we read Salinger as a religious writer we would see that he has not disappeared at all, although he has not published anything for a long time. We realize that he is encouraging us to have some spiritual emancipation In many of Salinger's works loneliness is used to make a boundary between the characters and evil. Society is portrayed as bad, and for many characters isolation from the society is the only way to achieve happiness. In Catcher in the Rye Holden Caufield's entire plot deals with him trying to isolate from society. Holden has trouble dealing with people in the world who quickly mask their true feelings and intentions.

He sticks to his childhood, trying to seek shelter from the phoniness of the world. Holden is comforted by his fond memories of himself and his siblings as children, before they were exposed to the evils of society, when life was simple, clear-cut, and straightforward. He becomes isolated in his own memories and cut off from the rest of the world. In one such recollection, Holden talks about his older brother D. B. : He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home. He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him.

The best one in it was "The Secret Goldfish." It was about this little kid that wouldn't let anybody look at his goldfish because he'd bought it with his own money. It killed me. Now he's out in Hollywood, D. B. , being a prostitute. If it's one thing that I hate, it's the movies.

Holden realizes that society has become bad (even children at Phoebes school While I was sitting down, I saw something that drove me crazy. Somebody'd written 'Fuck you' on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they'd wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them- all cockeyed, naturally- what it meant, and how they'd all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days. I kept wanting to kill whoever'd written it. I figured it was some poverty bum that'd sneaked in the school late at night to take a leak or something and then wrote it on the wall.

I kept picturing myself catching him at it, and how I'd smash his head on the stone Holden, like all the Salinger's characters, is essentially good; but he is trying to live in an unreal world, asking questions for which no natural answer is adequate. His characters are naturally good. They live in the two dimensions of the physical and the psychically world. For them religion is a means of being closer to the psychical world, forgetting about the physical one Society is used as the source of conflict in this case to be isolated from.

Holden is shown as just a hermit. at the end of Catcher in the Rye. He only wants to be separated from the society which considers him a misfit. In Salinger's works a source of unhappiness is usually the fact that society feels the characters are misfits. The characters can only become happy if they isolate themselves from this society. The isolation or loneliness also as a means to change in life or a way of life.

Seymour feels that society has become corrupt and achieving happiness will not be possible in such an empty and corrupted society, he sees that society has no more compassion on people, and that he must do something to change it. Salinger shows that Seymour wants nothing of this world and wants to be as far away as possible...


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