Salinger’s children:

Innocence and childhood sacredness in Nine Stories (1953)

Abstract

This article intends to demonstrate that there is a strong similarity between the way that the north American writer J.D. Salinger built the various child-characters of Nine Stories (1953) – specially the one named Teddy – and the romantic poetic of childhood, inaugurated by English authors like William Blake and William Wordworsth, where the child is represented as a sacred entity, carrier of a celestial purity and wisdom. Therefore, we operate a direct analysis of Salinger short stories – by which we explore his characters and literary techniques –, but also a wide bibliographic review that aim to track back the motives that led to the emergence of this literary poetic of childhood during the Eighteenth Century and it’s continuity until the Twentieth Century, apart from identifying some of the interinfluences of the philosophical, theological, and psychanalytic doctrines that debated the childhood during the last centuries. Thus, this article transits by questions as: child education and development, the original sin, innocence, social and worldliness experience, purity of intentions and the natural state, spiritual illumination, Christian Salvation, and Zen-Buddhist Nirvana. Elements that bind to the childhood sanctification operated by several literary authors, like Blake, Wordsworth, and, of course, Salinger.