J. D. Salinger and The Brothers Karamazov: A Response to Horst-Jürgen Gerigk's "Dostojewskis Jüngling und Salingers Catcher in the Rye"

Donald M. Fiene, University of Tennessee

Gerigk's demonstration of an influence on The Catcher in the Rye of Dostoevsky's Podrostok (see Dostoevsky Studies, 4:37-52) is both brilliant and mistaken. It is brilliant because it points to an undoubted Dostoevskian element in Salinger. It is mistaken because it insists on The Adolescent rather than The Brothers Karamazov as the source of Dostoevsky's influence on Salinger's unique novel.

The Adolescent is not, in my opinion, a good candidate for influence, primarily because there are so many better known novels by Dostoevsky that the young Salinger would more likely have read first. Hence, he might not have gotten around to The Adolescent at all.

There is also the problem that Arkadii Dolgorukii, at nineteen, is three years older than Holden Caulfield - a crucial difference at that early stage in life. Even so, Gerigk points out many seemingly valid parallels between the two novels. On the other hand, so does Lillian Furst point out many seemingly valid parallels between The Catcher in the Rye and a Dostoevsky novel - in her case, Notes from Underground.(1) Here the differences in the two texts seem very great. Yet Notes from Underground, as well as The Adolescent, makes use of a first-person narrator, as does The Catcher in the Rye.

My purpose, however, is not to engage either Gerigk or Furst in elaborate polemic, but simply to follow my own path in demonstrating that The Brothers Karamazov is the likely source of Dostoevsky's influence on The Catcher in the Rye.

First of all, it is significant that. Salinger quotes from The Brothers Karamazov in his story, "For Esmé - with Love and Squalor", published in 1950 - about a year before Catcher appeared.(2) In that story Sergeant X discovers, on the fly ; leaf of a book belonging to a Nazi woman he has arrested, a Ibrief inscription in "hopelessly sincere" handwriting: "Dear ;God, life is hell." Sergeant X picks up a pencil stub and !; writes beneath those words the following: "Fathers and teachers, I ponder, 'What is hell?1 I maintain that it is the : suffering of being unable to love." He then attempts to write |down Dostoevsky's name, but cannot, because his hands are shaking too much. (He is suffering from battle fatigue, following!the D-Day landings.) In other words. Sergeant X happens to I know by heart these poignant lines from "The Conversations land Exhortations of Father Zosima." (See Brothers, Book VI, (Chapter 3, Section i.) This implies that already by 1944 Sergeant X must have read The Brothers Karamazov many times. And since Sergeant X clearly speaks for the author in this story,

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sharing his war experiences as well, then perhaps Salinger, too, had often read that novel. Salinger, by the way, was a staff sergeant in 1944; he landed on Utah Beach on D-Day with the Fourth Division; he was in the 12th Infantry."(3)

I think it is safe to say that Salinger read Brothers at least once. By 1951 he is able to say that he loves Dostoevsky, along with a number of other writers who have influenced him. (4) For Salinger to have been influenced by Dostoevsky in the writing of Catcher, one would expect him to have read Dostoevsky quite early - well before 1941, when he first began to compose actual chapters of the novel.(5) But one can certainly imagine the twenty-year-old Salinger, a member of Whit Burnett's writing class at Columbia University in 1939, deciding to read Dostoevsky's greatest novel.(6)

In the discussion that follows I shall refer more often to parallels than direct influence, but the reader will understand that "influence" is usually meant.

The most compelling parallel in the two novels is that between Holden Caulfield and Kolia Krasotkin. In fact, I will deal in this article almost exclusively with that portion of Brothers treating "the boys": several early chapters, Book 10, and the final chapter of the Epilogue - about 50,000 words in all. It is a nicely contained subplot, a novel within a novel that nevertheless carries all the major themes of the larger work. It is true that Catcher has about 85,000 words, but it is still not really a novel from the Russian point of view, but only a povest', as the story of Kolia and the boys would also be classified. We must admit, however, that Holden is a more fully developed character who furthermore narrates his own story, as Kolia does not. On the other hand, the story of Kolia has greater philosophical depth because of its ties to the larger novel.

We must also face the fact that the two boys are not the same age - an important consideration in comparing adolescents. However, the two-year age difference between them is not as great as it might seem. Although Holden Caulfield as narrator is seventeen years old, he is only sixteen when the action of the novel takes place. And although he is quite sophisticated at times, he tells us that he acts quite young for his age: "... sometimes I act like I'm about thirteen. It's really ironical..."(7) Kolia, meanwhile, is thirteen - or, rather, as he tells us, fourteen - that is, "I shall be fourteen very soon, in a couple of weeks."(8) Dostoevsky had originally intended Kolia to be no older than thirteen, but he agreed to add one year to Kolia's age while declining to follow his editor N. A. Liubimov's implicit request to add as much as two years to the boy's age.(9) In other words, Holden and Kolia may be seen as being within a year of each other in chronological age, though we can only guess at what this means in the context of their historical separation of almost a century and their cultural separation as Russian and American.

In his knowledge of philosophy and political theory (however limited) Kolia is superior to Holden, seems older. He is cer-

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certainly a better student and furthermore keeps his reputation with his classmates while earning top grades. But Holden is very much a reader of books, a good writer, and sometimes comes on as a full-blown literary critic. Kolia also seems older in that he is a leader among his schoolmates, while Holden is an American loner type. But Holden seems older for his greater sexual curiosity and overall "sophistication." Yet Holden remains sexually innocent despite his intentions, while Kolia is shown, within the limits placed on Dostoevsky by the Russian censor, at least to be more knowledgable about sex than his contemporaries. That is, he has read the uncensored eighteenth-century book, A Kinsman of Mahomet or Salutary Folly and then swapped it to young Morozov for the little bronze canon (51 5/XIV: 493) . He understands the sexual implications of the relationship between Eugene Onegin and Tatiana (524/XIV:501 ). And he is fully aware of the situation concerning the servant girl Katerina's pregnancy and angers Agafia by directly referring to it (495 :XIV: 471 ). Kolia should not be seen as similar to Alesha, as the latter was when he was a schoolboy. Rather than refusing to hear any dirty words (like Alesha, who had put his fingers in his ears), Kolia most likely utters them freely. As Dostoevsky observes early in the novel, "There are 'certain' words and conversations unhappily impossible to eradicate in schools. Boys pure in mind and heart, almost children, are fond of talking in school among themselves, and even aloud, of things, pictures, and images of which even soldiers would sometimes hesitate to speak." (14/XIV: 19) (10) If Dostoevsky had had Salinger's comparative freedom of expression Kolia would have spoken very much like Holden Caulfield. (Meanwhile, by the standards of the 1980's, Holden’s speech is quite mild. He uses no major taboo words. Although the word "fuck" appears in the novel, it is not really used by Holden - though its presence in the book was enough to give Catcher world-wide notoriety. (1 1 )

The question of the real ages of Holden and Kolia is all the more interesting because each character is based in large measure on autobiographical recollections which have then been altered for literary purposes. We have already noted that Dostoevsky assigned too young an age to Kolia, then agreed to make him older, while Salinger (as mentioned in note 6) has assigned his own misadventures as a college dropout at age nineteen or twenty to a boy of sixteen. In particular, the geographical relationship between Ursinus College and Manhattan (see note 6) fits the novel. Salinger had also transferred out of a prep school due to low grades - though not at Christmastime - when he was fifteen (see note 6) . Probably elements of that experience enter into Holden’s life as well. The foregoing further contributes to the conclusion that neither boy is fixed at one particular age and that occasionally the boys seem to be about the same age. Each is a composite figure created for an essentially didactic purpose.

A comparative analysis of the two boys is facilitated by the fact that we are given only minimum information about the families of each. From Holden we learn that his parents are "nice and all - I'm not saying that - but they're also touchy

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as hell."(1/3), that his father is a wealthy corporation lawyer (107/140), and that his mother is "nervous as hell" (158/ 206) and that he is genuinely concerned about her. The parents make no appearance in the novel.

Likewise, Kolia's parents are absent from his story, except for the background information that Kolia's father had been a "provincial secretary", that he had died about the time Kolia was born, and that a romance was now slowly developing between the school teacher Dardanelov and Kolia's mother, a woman of excellent character who is loved by her son, but not to the point of "sheepish sentimentality." The mother's role is greater here, but the parents play almost no role in helping us understand Kolia. We see that both boys accept their family situations matter-of-factly and are not in rebellion against their parents. Holden feels the injustice in his having more money than some of his classmates, but he does not seem angry at his father over this. Rather, he rails at the unjust world, filled to overflowing with phonies and bastards.

Kolia is less critical in this respect than Holden - but surely his attack on the German doctor attending Iliusha, whom he addresses as "apothecary", and who prompts the remark that all Germans "want strangling", is the spiritual equivalent of Holden's famous denunciation of the rich undertaker named Ossenburger, who has donated money to Pencey Prep and who tells the students at chapel that he "talks" to Jesus all the time, even when he is driving his car. "That killed me", says Holden. "I can just see the big phony bastard shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs." (17/23) Of course, Kolia's socialism implies sharp criticism of the political-economic status quo. Holden says little about politics, but there is implicit political awareness in his remarks on the prep-school cliché that "life is a game": "Game my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right - I'll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren't any hot-shots, then what's a game about it? Nothing. No game." (8/12)

The main difference between the boys is that Holden gets so depressed over wordly injustice that he has a nervous breakdown, while Kolia (surprisingly, perhaps, for Dostoevsky) seems to have no suicidal tendencies - if you don't count the train incident. But the values of the two boys are similar: liberal and essentially middle-class in origin. We might say that Holden has certain Russian or Dostoevskian elements in his personality, for all that he remains an American, while Kolia has all the cheerful audacity and initiative that one associates with Americans. Still, Kolia is able to confess to Alesha that he is "profoundly unhappy." (527/XIV.-503) Both boys may be seen as Eastern-Western composites, or, simply, "international" types with corresponding worldwide appeal.

Holden's affection for his sister Phoebe has a close parallel in Kolia's solicitous concern for his "little chickens", Kostia and Nastia, the son and daughter of his mother's boarder. Thus (considering also the foregoing), we see that the families of the two boys are parallel in significant ways, but

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mostly in the fact that they are incidental to the boys themselves, upon whom all the drama is focused. Consequently, it is not so much adolescent psychology that the authors are concerned with as the ideas, especially spiritual and moral, that are held by a particular adolescent with a compellingly believable and appealing personality. Knowing as we do the profound impact of both The Brothers Karamazov and The Catcher in the Rye on the world, we may say that Kolia and Holden each transcend the merely realistic to become both mythical and symbolic figures.

Before looking into this more important aspect of the two novels, I would like to mention a few more parallels that may or may not qualify as "influences." One is the wry sense of humor that both boys exhibit; more particularly, it is the skillful use of humor by both authors as a counterpoint to persistent echoes in the background of suffering, suicide, death and despair. In their personalities, both boys are intelligent, precocious, sensitive, charming, adventuresome, democratic and kind. Each has a somewhat rebellious attitude at the start, but both arrive at a state of acceptance. Both are cheerful braggarts while being simultaneously self-deprecating. One recalls Kolia's effort to impress Alesha by implying that he has at least a minimum familiarity with Voltaire: "I've read Candide in the Russian translation... in an absurd, grotesque, old translation... (At it again! again!)'" (523/XIV.-50O) When he suddenly realizes he has been keeping Alesha standing in the bitter cold without an overcoat, he apologizes elaborately: "You see what an egoist I am. Oh, we are all egotists, Karamazov." (507/XIV:483) (12) Holden's continual criticism of "athletic bastards", "Ivy League bastards", Laurence Olivier, the Lunts and Ernest Hemingway amounts to a great deal of implicit bragging - but Holden can be sharply self-critical as in his confession to Phoebe that "they had this goddam secret fraternity that I was too yellow not to join." (167/217)

Kolia's conversations with peasants are parallelled by Holden's chats with cab drivers. Perhaps Holden's gregariousness has elements in it of Kolia's fondness for "stir[ring] up fools in every class of society." (501/XIV:477) One of Holden's cabbies, Horwitz, becomes quite stirred up over Holden's desire to know where the ducks in Central Park go in the winter. He crazily compares them to the fish that get frozen right in the ice and never move all winter. He says that the bodies of the fish "take in nutrition and all, right through the goddam seaweed and crap that's in the ice. They got their pores open the whole time. That's their nature for Chrissake. See what I mean?" (83/108) Somehow this speech reminds me of Kolia's conversation with Smurov about canine etiquette. "’I like to watch such realistic scenes, Smurov, said Kolia suddenly. 'Have you noticed how dogs sniff at one another when they meet? It seems to be a law of their nature.'" (497/XIV: 473) Both Holden and Kolia have an almost scientific curiosity. In general, the motif of "ducks" in Catcher has a certain similarity to the motif of "dogs" in the Kolia-Iliusha story. Or we may say that both works are alike simply in the number and variety of the motifs and refrains to be found in them, regardless whether the motifs may be assigned a significant

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or obvious meaning. Thus in Catcher we have Jane Gallagher's checker kings, Holden's red hunting hat, and Allie's fielder's mitt. In the Kolia-Iliusha story we have, for instance, the great stone and the motif of "the founder of Troy" (echoed also in Dardanelov's apt name) and Smaragdov's World History.

A more significant parallel in the two works is the importance placed on the theme of the suffering of children. And here, I think, we may begin to speak of genuine influence. Exact parallels are less important than the dramatization of a basic concept - but in this instance the parallels seem to be there as well. However, we must suppose that any influence would be based only on an impressionistic recollection of a novel read some years earlier.

Iliusha is a major symbol of the innocent child who dies for reasons that we cannot understand. He has also suffered - from taunting by his classmates, from poverty and a drunken buffoon of a father, and from the illness that finally kills him. He is a proud, brave boy, loyal to his father, and so on. He is befriended by Kolia and helped also by Alesha, who later becomes Kolia's mentor, almost his starets. In describing Iliusha, Dostoevsky makes frequent use of the number three; e.g., Iliusha is buried "three days" after his death (see 504, 506, 511, 729-30/XIV:480, 482, 487, XV:191), and he informs us that there was "practically no smell" from Iliusha's corpse. We are thus led to accept Iliusha as a saint, perhaps even a kind of Christ figure, insofar as he dies an innocent victim, sacrificed by God.

While there is no corresponding character as strong as Iliusha in Catcher, Holden does tell us about the boy James Castle who bravely refuses to give in to the six or seven classmates who are tormenting him - and he is "a skinny little weak-looking guy, with wrists about as big as pencils." (170/ 221) In other words, he is physically similar to Iliusha, and as brave. Like Iliusha he dies - except that he commits suicide by jumping from a window. He happens to be wearing Holden's turtleneck sweater at the time. Holden had not known him well, but had nevertheless befriended him by letting him borrow the sweater. After the boy has fallen to the ground, the only person who comes to his aid is Mr. Antolini. "Old Mr. Antolini felt his pulse and all, and then he took off his coat and put it over James Castle and carried him all the way over to the infirmary. He didn't even give a damn if his coat got all bloody." (174/226-7) Mr. Antolini, parallel to Alesha, is genuinely a mentor to Holden, even though Salinger has chosen to give him a flawed personality that is troubling to Holden. (We might observe here that as far as mentors are concerned, Alesha is to nineteenth-century Skotoprigonevsk as Mr. Antolini is to twentieth-century Manhattan.) Finally we may note that James Castle has the same initials as Jesus Christ; perhaps there is an attempt here to make Castle, like Iliusha, a symbolic sacrificial victim.

The theme of the suffering child is further developed in Catcher with the beloved younger brother of Holden who had died of leukemia at the age of eleven, when Holden was thirteen.

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(13) Holden's rebellion against society's "rules" and his frequent spells of depression are due in large measure to his resentment over Allie's death. Holden's frequent references to Allie allow one to conclude that the theme of the suffering of the innocent is very nearly as pronounced in Catcher as it is in the Kolia story.

There is a further connection between the two works in the advice given to the two boys by their mentors. Mr. Antolini, fearing that Holden will die nobly, "one way or another, for some highly unworthy cause", cites the following cautionary words written by the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel: "The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one." (188/244) Kolia, meanwhile, has expressed envy of Dmitrii, who "will perish an innocent victim for truth." He declares to Alesha, "Oh, if I, too, could sacrifice myself some day for truth!" Alesha replies: "But not in such a cause, not with such disgrace and such horror!" (728/ XIV:190) In other remarks to Kolia (see 528/XIV:504) Alesha also seems to anticipate some of the speeches of Mr. Antolini to Holden.

There are three areas of similarity between the Kolia story and Catcher that together especially point to a likely influence of the former on the latter. The first, which has already been touched upon, is the theme of children, presented as the focal point for contemplating both the unjustified suffering of humanity and the hope of salvation for all men. The second is a more particular examination of Christianity - and of Jesus - as a possible agency for salvation, or for discovering the possibility of being able to love all men. The third is the literary means for carrying out this examination - which includes the use of selected motifs and symbolic language that act to raise the central characters to mythical levels of significance.

First I shall summarize the Kolia story with respect to these three topics, and then Catcher, and in so doing conclude this article.

The theme of children, especially as innocent sufferers (in particular as defined by Ivan), is central to The Brothers Karamazov. The Kolia story, as a focal point of that theme, becomes an important answer to Ivan's argument for the Grand Inquisitor. That is, the contemplation of children suffering need not end in rebellion against God and rejection of His world, but may take the form of paradoxical acceptance of God's world while resolving to love and forgive others and above all to protect and shelter all the children who come into one's life.

The role of savior and protector of children is played certainly by Alesha as he looks out for all the "nestlings" in Kolia's circle. But Kolia is no less a protector; and just as he ardently declares himself a disciple of Alesha, so has Iliusha been enrolled as a disciple of Kolia (see 504/XIV: 480). Kolia's protective attitude toward little Nastia and

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Kostia is central to our first impression of him. He later tells Alesha, "...I'am always fond of children. I've two chickens on my hands at home now..." (504/XIV:479) And he insists that when he had recently "played robbers with the preparatory boys", he had not been playing for his own amusement, but "for the sake of the children." (507/XIV:483) His protective relationship to Iliusha (but also to Iliusha's crippled sister Nina - another suffering child) needs no further elaboration here. Toward the other schoolboys - Smurov, Kartashov, Morozov, etc., he maintains an almost avuncular attitude. Finally, all the boys together, reconciled at Iliusha's stone, resolve to be kind and honest, never to forget one another, and not to be afraid of life. Kolia leads them in a rapturous salute to Alesha: "Hurrah for Karamazov!"

We may suppose that Kolia has come close to accepting his native religion as the novel ends - following upon the funeral in the "old and rather poor" church, Alesha's defense of the customary funeral dinner, and Alehsa's assent to Kolia's question as to whether "we shall all rise again from the dead and shall live and see each other again..." (735/XV:197) However, Dostoevsky leaves considerable room for doubt as to Kolia's true orthodoxy - as to whether or not he has been fully converted from his schoolboy atheism.

Kolia's earlier rejection of God and his outright dismissal of Christianity seem to reflect the influence of Rakitin. However his thoughts about Jesus, indirectly derived from Belinsky - who did write something similar despite Alesha's denial of it - seem as though they might be genuinely his own: "I am not opposed to Christ, if you like. He was a most humane person, and if he were alive today, he would be found in the ranks of the revolutionists..." (524/XIV:500) Here we find a certain affinity with Ivan Karamazov, who, after all, was in part based on Belinsky. Kolia is even more obviously like Ivan when he quotes Voltaire: "...if there were no God He would have to be invented." (523/XIV:499) This, too, may be Rakitin's malicious influence - but at least Kolia knows Voltaire to be the author of the words. However, what is most significant here is that Dostoevsky implicitly bestows on Kolia some of the features of Ivan. Kolia reminds us of Ivan, and of his best qualities, moreover - as when Kolia admits to being "profoundly unhappy" and confesses that he is ready "to overturn the whole order of things." (527/XIV:503) But Kolia is not as deeply committed to rebellion and denial as Ivan is; instead of declaring with Ivan that "if God does not exist, then all is lawful", Kolia instead wants to believe that it is possible "for one who doesn't believe in God to love mankind..." (523/ XIV:524) At no point in the novel, by the way, does anyone specifically deny this possibility - in any case, not Alesha. If this is meant to reflect Kolia's truest belief, then it very much anticipates twentieth-century secularism.

Kolia is a very young but perhaps a sincere socialist. Also, he is influenced by Alesha and loves him. He is Alesha's disciple. But he is also a symbolic counterpart to Ivan. And even if he should remain, like Ivan, an atheist and a materialist (at least as the church would view his beliefs), we need not suppose that he would necessarily be condemned by Dostoevsky.

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After all, we have Zosima's Christlike admonition to his monks, as though from a new Sermon on the Mount: "Hate not the atheists, the teachers of evil, the materialists - and I mean not only the good ones - for there are many good ones among them, especially in our day - hate not even the wicked ones. Remember them in your prayers..." (149/XIV:149)

Even more interesting is that Kolia, apart from his desire to emulate Dmitrii - to die for truth, may be seen to possess several features of Dmitrii's personality - in particular his boldness (the train incident) and his passion for "real life." When Kolia says to Alesha early in their friendship, "Contact with real life will cure you..." (522/XIV:499), we are bound to recognize a symbolic connection with Dmitrii, who uses that phrase, "real life", a dozen or more times throughout the novel.

The consequence of these observations is that Kolia becomes a symbolic union of the character traits and beliefs of all three Karamazov brothers. Probably Dostoevsky means for Kolia to incorporate the best features of each, and thus to become an embodiment of hope for mankind, as the novel closes.

It also seems to be true that Dostoevsky intends for us to see Kolia as a tentative Christ figure - as when Kolia says to Alesha, "I would like to die for all humanity..." (728/XV: 190) But the outlines of such an enactment would have to be seen as embracing the visions of Ivan and Dmitrii as well as Alesha, at least symbolically, and not necessarily resembling very much the Orthodox version of Jesus. Kolia as a Christ figure (as savior and protector of the little children) might simply reflect the idea that each human being is in some sense a re-creation of Jesus. Or perhaps Dostoevsky is placing Kolia in a continuous chain of teachers and disciples descending from Father Zosima to Alesha to Kolia to Iliusha. The sequence would actually begin with the historical Jesus, with each disciple-teacher in turn becoming a symbolic representation of Jesus.

Zosima may rather easily be seen as such a representation. And Alesha often plays a symbolic role as Jesus - as when he kisses Ivan following his recitation of "The Grand Inquisitor" ("That's plagiarism!" exclaims Ivan), or when he offers Grushen'ka uncritical understanding (Rakitin, in that scenario of the "little onion", is Judas; see p. 336/XIV:325). In the "Cana of Galilee" chapter Alesha is symbolically resurrected. And finally, in the last chapter, Alesha plays the role almost of a secularized Jesus, surrounded by his child-disciples, of whom there are "about twelve" (727/XV:189); he preaches to them ; not in a church but at a stone - it is even referred to once ' as an "unholy stone" - but it is a stone invoked often through-out the novel. It is most obviously the place of the humiliation and suffering of Captain Snegirev and his son Iliusha. But when Alesha speaks over the stone it becomes the "rock" (Peter) of the Christian church. That is, wherever people are gathered in the name of Jesus, there will He appear. Dostoevsky really seems to imply at this point that the formal church is irrelevant to true Christianity.

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A significant indication of Kolia's position in Dostoevsky's chain of teachers and disciples occurs when Alesha says to him: "You know, Kolia, you will be very unhappy in your life ... But you will bless life on the whole, all the same." (528/XIV.-504) These are almost the same words used in the last speech of Father Zosima to Alesha, when he tells him that he will live like a monk in the world: "You will have many enemies, but even your foes will love you. Life will bring you many misfortunes, but you will find your happiness in them, and will bless life and make others bless it..." (264/XIV:259)

Thus we may say that as Alesha is to Father Zosima, so Kolia is to Alesha. And insofar as Alesha acts out symbolically the role of Jesus as minister in the world, so too does Kolia at a lower level.

Having examined in the Kolia story the themes of children and Jesus and the use of symbolism in their presentation, we may now do the same for The Catcher in the Rye.

Holden's concern for children is not limited to his sister Phoebe and his dead brother Allie. The central symbol of the novel is inspired by a child singing a song, the first line of which Holden takes to be, "If a body catch a body coming through the rye." (115/150) Holden's sensitivity to the little boy, who is simply seen out walking with his parents, is keen. "The kid was swell. He was walking in the street instead of on the sidewalk, but right next to the curb. He was making out like he was walking a very straight line, the way kids do, and the whole time he kept singing and humming." (115/150)

Later he talks with a girl Phoebe's age, about ten. He helps her tighten her roller skates. "She was a very nice, polite little kid. God, I love it when a kid is nice and polite when you tighten their skate for them or something. Most kids are. They really are." (119/155) He recalls his own childhood, how when he was in the fourth grade his class would visit the Museum of Natural History and how, if you had some marbles in your hand and dropped them, "they bounced like madmen all over the floor and made a helluva racket..." (120/156) Later he drops by the museum and runs into two young boys, brothers, looking for the Egyptian room. He horses around with them a little and asks them if they know what mummies are. The older brother answers, "'You know... them dead guys. That get buried in them toons and all.'" "Toons", says Holden. "That killed me. He meant tombs." (2O3/263) All of this reflects Holden's (that is, Salinger's) acute perception of children.

Like Kolia, Holden has a protective attitude toward younger children, though almost to a neurotic degree. Kolia seems to understand better the need to encourage children to take chances in life, to inquire, explore. We see this in his amused but uncritical eavesdropping on Nastia and Kostia as they discuss where babies come from; in his instructions to Smurov ("Boy, shun a lie..." 496/XIV:472); and his hectoring of poor Kartashev for failing to understand the nuances of historiography. Holden does not adopt so realistic a position as this, not even in dealing with his sister. And when he

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sees at her school the words "Fuck you" written on a wall, he imagines the psychological harm this will do the little kids and wants to kill the bastard {"some perverty bum", he supposes) who wrote them there. He erases the words - but then sees another "Fuck you" in a different place, this time scratched on the wall, and realizes that "It's hopeless, anyway. If you had a million years to do it in you couldn't rub out even half the 'Fuck you' signs in the world. It's impossible." (202/262) Although this is probably Holden's psychological low point in the novel, his whole intent here is to protect little children and save them from harm. In so doing, he acts out the vision he has of himself, that he has earlier described to Phoebe: "'...I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all... I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff... That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all." (173/224)

Holden envisions himself as an eternally reliable savior, and it is impossible not to see him, therefore, as a Christ figure, Salinger's symbolism does not present Holden as a sacrificial victim (like James Castle or Iliusha); he is consequently very similar to Kolia at the symbolic level.

There are a number of significant references to Jesus and Christianity in The Catcher in the Rye, perhaps enough to qualify religion, in Salinger's interpretation, to be the central theme of the novel. This theme is supported even in small details, which, through repetition, become symbolic. For instance, the word Christmas, which one naturally expects to come up in a novel set in December, nevertheless occurs over two dozen times. At that level of repetition we are justified in concluding that the real motif here points to Jesus Christ, not to a gaudy American holiday. One might say the same thing about Holden's extremely frequent use of the expletive, "For Chrissake;" (That is, "For the sake of Christ.") This I see as similar to Dostoevsky's frequent repetition of the number three - which sometimes seems to confer on practically everybody a "Christ" status, but which in any case evokes the Trinity and the conscious patterning of "threes" in the New Testament. A rather different type of symbolism in The Brothers Karamazov is the arrangement of the novel into twelve books and an epilogue (of three chapters) to evoke the twelve disciples and Jesus the way that thirteen domes on a church would.

Holden's attitude toward religion partly reflects a desire to escape from profane life. He tells Ackley, for instance, that he is "toying with the idea" of joining a monastery (50/65). His generous and solicitous attention to the two nuns (109-113/142-147) is doubtless related to that idea. There is also his related desire to live in a cabin in the woods and pretend to be a deaf-mute, etc. (see 132 & 198/ 171 & 258). (One cannot help but mention here Franny Glass's later obsession with Russian Orthodox monastic life via the pilgrim who continually repeats the Jesus prayer.)(14) Holden's perception of Jesus seems to have more of a "Russian" aura about it than a Roman Catholic one, despite his affection for the nuns and

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the fact that his father was a Catholic before getting married (112/146). He first mentions Jesus in connection with the "big phony bastard" Ossenburger, implying that no rich man could ever have a legitimate connection with Jesus Christ (17/23). In his second commentary on Jesus Holden explains that he can't always pray when he feels like it: "In the first place, I'm sort of an atheist. I like Jesus and all, but I don't care too much for most of the other stuff in the Bible. Take the Disciples, for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth. They were all right after Jesus was dead and all, but while he was alive, they were about as much use to him as a hole in the head." (99/130) These remarks are almost identical in spirit to Kolia's first speech to Alesha on the character of his religious beliefs: he is an atheist, yet he also admires Jesus. He is also like Kolia in complaining about the ritualism of orthodoxy. He says he can't stand ministers: "... they all have these Holy Joe voices when they start giving their sermons. God, I hate that. I don't see why the hell they can't talk in their natural voice." (100/131) At the same time, Holden is appalled by the sacrilegious Christmas pageant at Radio City Music Hall, with "thousands" of people - all sorts of angels and "guys carrying crucifixes" - singing "Come All Ye Faithful!" "Big deal. It's supposed to be religious as hell, I know, and very pretty and all, but I can't see anything religious or pretty, for God's sak, about a bunch of actors carrying crucifixes all over the stage (137/178).

Holden next recalls his argument with the Quaker boy, Arthur Childs, on the question of whether Judas went to hell after he committed suicide. Childs says yes, but Holden says no: "I said I'd bet a thousand bucks that Jesus never sent old Judas to Hell... I think any one of the Disciples would've sent him to Hell and all - and fast, too - but I'll bet anything Jesus didn't do it." (100/131) Holden's theology here quite obviously reflects a Dostoevskian compassion for the sinner - even the greatest of sinners. One might look for a source in the kiss bestowed by Jesus on the Grand Inquisitor, or in the remarks of Father Zosima as transcribed by Alesha: "... woe to the suicides! I believe that there can be none more miserable than they. They tell us that it is a sin to pray to God for them and outwardly the church, as it were, renounces them, but in my secret heart I believe that we may pray even for them. Love can never be an offense to Christ. For such as those I have prayed inwardly all my life..." (302/XIV.-293) Here again, by the way, we have a theology that implicitly rejects orthodoxy while accepting only Jesus.

In his final reference to Jesus, Holden speaks of an argument he had with Sally Hayes. He reports telling her that "Jesus would've puked" if he could have seen the Radio City Christmas pageant. Sally calls him a "sacrilegious atheist." To this Holden assents: "I probably am." (137/178) However, he goes on to declare that "The thing Jesus really would've liked would be the guy that plays the kettle drums in the orchestra." (138/ 178) He and Allie had loved that drummer, who only gets to bang the drums a couple of times during a whole piece - but who never looked bored and was always sweetly attentive. The theology here is approximately that of the Sermon on the Mount:

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Blessed are the meek, etc., and as such fully compatible with Dostoevsky's emphasis on the Gospels.

There remains to discuss similarities in style between Dostoevsky and Salinger. We have already mentioned each writer's use of certain motifs to emphasize, in symbolic fashion, various religious themes. These include the symbol of the stone in Brothers, which finally seems to stand for the modern secular church. In Catcher there are two motifs in particular that dominate the text. One is Holden's red hunting hat. The hat is mentioned at least twenty times. Holden usually wears it backwards. The other motif is Allie's fielder's mitt; though mentioned only a few times, it clearly has special significance (one recalls Holden's composition about it that he wrote for Stradlatter). The key to the meaning of these symbols is that in the game of baseball only the catcher's hat is worn backwards; and a fielder's mitt is used to catch hit balls in the outfield. These symbols complement each other in evoking throughout the novel its central image - the catcher in the field of rye who is like a Savior. (15)

The last time the red hat is mentioned is when Holden is watching Phoebe on the carousel at the end of the novel. She and the other children keep reaching for the gold ring, which is set at a sufficient distance from the carousel so that the children have to lean way out from their horses to have a chance of snatching it. Holden is afraid that Phoebe will fall, but finally he decides: "The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to them." (211/273) Here the symbolism tells us that Holden has modified his vision of catching the children before they fall off the cliff. He realizes that they must be allowed to grow up and face life -though his concern for them is in no way diminished. Meanwhile, he himself has already decided not to go out west and live in a cabin and pretend to be a deaf-mute - that is, to run from life, from his problems. So now, when Phoebe takes the red hat out of her pocket and puts it back on her brother's head, we understand that Holden is still the catcher in the rye, the Savior who cares for children, but now he no longer wants to shield them from "real life." (One recalls Alesha's final speech: "Ah children, ah dear friends, don't be afraid of life!")

It is at this point that Holden, entering upon maturity, becomes very like Kolia, allowing us to minimize most of the differences between them that we have noted up to this point. The chief difference that cannot be dismissed is that Mr. Antolini is a rather weak parallel to Alesha. But this seems not so important in light of the similar religious views of the boys. Each may be seen as a "secular Christian" - not believing in God, yet striving to love mankind - and looking to Jesus Christ for moral guidance while remaining agnostic as to His "divinity."

A most gratifying thing for the thesis of this article is that Salinger's last chapter or two carry much the same

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message as the concluding chapter of Brothers. There is the same culmination of a long movement from rebellion to acceptance, the same (implicit) perception that "all are responsible to all for all" - and there is even a possible echo of the structure of Dostoevsky's novel. Whereas Brothers has thirteen major sections, twelve books and an epilogue, Catcher has twenty-six chapters - just double the formal pattern in the earlier work.

Most significant is that Holden's final words reflect, in a twentieth-century way, Alesha's plea for reconciliation and his admonition to the boys that they never forget one another. Holden says, "... I sort of miss everybody I told about. Even old Stradlatter and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that goddam Maurice. It's funny. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

The foregoing, I believe, obliges one to suppose that The Brothers Karamazov is the most likely source of Dostoevsky's influence on The Catcher in the Rye.

NOTES

1. Lillian R. Furst, "Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye", Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 5 (1978), 72-85. I know of no other article on Salinger and Dostoevsky besides those of Gerigk and Furst. Probably there are a number of brief references to Salinger in relation to Dostoevsky, but I am able to cite only one - in H. R. Grunwald's "Introduction" to the book edited by him, Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait New York: Cardinal, 1963; also Harper, 1962). One section of this introduction is titled "Beatnik Peter Pan vs. Ivan Karamazov" (xiv-xvii). It sees the rebellion of Holden, Huck Finn and Ivan as essentially similar. There is no suggestion of an actual influence of Dostoevsky on Salinger. As for direct evidence of Salinger having read Dostoevsky, a note by William Maxwell in The Book-of-the-Month Club News (July 1951), 6, quotes Salinger as saying that he loves Kafka, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Proust, O'Casey, Rilke, Lorca, Keats, Rimbaud, Burns, E. Bronte, Jane Austen, Henry James, Blake and Coleridge. I have found no other evidence of this sort, relying on such sources as my own master's thesis, "A Bibliographical Study of J. D. Salinger: Life, Work and Reputation", University of Louisville, 1961. Much of the latter is reprinted in my "J. D. Salinger: A Bibliography, "Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 4/1 (Winter 1963), 109-149. A more recent (and excellent) bibliography is that by Jack R. Sublett, J. D. Salinger: An Annotated Bibliography, 1938-1981 (New York and London: Garland, 1984). A forthcoming literary biography of Salinger could conceivably refer to Dostoevsky: Ian Hamilton, J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life (New York: Random House, 1987).
2. New Yorker (April 8, 1950), 28-36.

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3. See autobiographical note by Salinger in Esquire, 24 (October 1945), 3, 4. An excellent wartime photo of Sergeant Salinger appears in Harper's, 218 (February 1959), 85. Further circumstantial evidence that Salinger had read The Brothers Karamazov is to be found on the first page of his Story, "Last Day of the Last Furlough", Saturday Evening Post, 217 (July 15, 1944) 26-27, 61-62, 64. Technical Sergeant Babe Gladwaller, home on leave and about to go overseas, is relaxing at home in a room strewn with books. "At the moment the sergeant was at the studio of Mihailov the painter, with Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky. A few minutes ago he had stood with Father Zossima and Alyosha Karamazov on the portico below the monastery." This and the reference to Dostoevsky in "Esmé" seem to be the only ones in all of Salinger's writings.
4. See note 1.
5. Salinger composed early drafts of Chapters 15, 17, 19 and 20 of The Catcher in the Rye in 1941, organizing them as a single short story under the title, "Slight Rebellion off Madison." The New Yorker bought that story in 1941 and set it into type, but publication was delayed on account of the war. It was finally published by that magazine on December 21, 1946, pp. 76-79. Salinger had also written drafts of Chapters 1, 2 and 22 very early; they were published as a story, "I'm Crazy", in Collier's (December 22, 1945), pp. 36, 48, 51. In addition, he refers to young Caulfield (first name not given) in the Saturday Evening Post story described in note He is the younger brother of a friend of Sergeant Gladwaller; he is twenty, had "flunked out of a lot of schools", and is now missing in action. Although Salinger worked on Catcher right up to 1951, he possibly had arrived at the basic conception of it by the time he went into the army in 1942.
6. Columbia was the last university attended by Salinger. The other two were New York University (Washington Square), 1936-37; and Ursinus College, Collegeville, Pennsylvania, fall 1938. He never got past the freshman year in any of them. The biographical source for Catcher is primarily Salinger's dropping out of Ursinus in December, 1938, at age nineteen (nearly twenty). He had completed Valley Forge Military Academy (Wayne, Pennsylvania) in June, 1936 (age seventeen), without exhibiting obvious signs of rebellion or alienation; he was even literary editor of the yearbook there. However, he had transferred to Valley Forge at age fifteen, after having done rather poorly at the McBurney School (Manhattan) over a two-year period. For the source of this information, see Note 1 as well as my forthcoming "Jerome David Salinger" in Great Lives from History (Pasadena: Salem Press, 1987).
7. The Catcher in the Rye (New York: Bantam, 1964), p. 9. The corresponding page in the hardcover edition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951) is 13. From now on in this article I will give the page numbers of each quotation in parentheses following the quote, giving first the paperback

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   and then the hardcover; e. g.: (9/13).

8. The Brothers Karamazov, tr. Constance Garnett, ed. R. Matlaw (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), p. 5O7. The corresponding page in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (L: Nauka, 1972-) is Vol. XIV (1976), p. 483. From now on in this article, quotations from The Brothers Karamazov will be from the Norton edition and the page number will be given in parentheses after the quote; following the Norton page number will be the volume and page number of Polnoe sobranie sochinenii; e. g.: (507/XIV: 483) .
9. See Liubimov's letter to Dostoevsky, April 12, 1880, and Dostoevsky's letter to Liubimov, April 13, 1880. (See, for instance, Norton ed. of Bros. K., 766-767.)
10. Dostoevsky's lament that certain words are unhappily impossible to eradicate in schools recalls Holden's vain effort to erase a certain taboo word from a wall in his sister's school.
11. As of 1951 this word had scarcely ever appeared in print in the United States, and never in a book of such popularity. Within a decade, the novel had been translated into at least seventeen languages (now it is up to thirty-five), of which only the following, in that early period, trans lated the taboo phrase, "Fuck you", into an equally force ful equivalent: Swedish, Danish, French, Spanish (Buenos Aires), Hebrew and Korean. The Czechs compromised with kurvo. The following translations used euphemisms, dashes or initial letters: Dutch, German, Norwegian, Finnish, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Russian, Estonian, Georgian and Japanese. I took the trouble to look up this in formation, because I, along with many other American high school teachers, got fired (in my case in 1960) for assigning Catcher to my English classes. It was precisely that one taboo phrase that made the novel unacceptable to school and city authorities.
12. Kolia's sudden awareness of Alesha's discomfort is perhaps an example of Grushen'ka's "little onion", thus linking him to one of the most important motifs in the novel.
13. There is the further echo, perhaps, of Father Zosima's brother who died young.
14. It is of more than incidental interest that the anonymous nineteenth-century Way of a Pilgriim (in the translation of R. M. French) has been continuously in print ever since Salinger gave it a place in "Franny."
15. The additional motif of the ducks in Central Park can be related to Holden if we consider that the ducks have a way to survive in the winter (according to the cab driver), while Holden, on the night of the novel, is homeless. Thus, Matthew 8:20, "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head." See James Lundquist on this in his J. D. Salinger (New York: Ungar, 1979), 40.