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Now I will update this topic for posterity.
JD Salinger worked for a joint British/US counter-intelligence unit in WWII, did you know that? Probably if you've read For Esme With Love and Squalor, it's not such a surprise. Did you know that his commanding officer was Henry Kissinger? Both men spoke French and German, and were interrogators. This was the same division, the CIC, that recruited Klaus Barbie and other Nazi scientists after the war.
Uh, as to a subtextual connection between lone gunmen and Catcher in the Rye. The book is narrated by Holden Caulfield, a neurotic, slightly delusional middle class teenager; it is written in the first person. But frequently, the narrator flips that around, and begins referring to himself in the second person, which is a natural enough conversational shift. People do that for emphasis, when they are trying make the description of some experience really impactful to their audience. However, and while I don't have the statistics handy to back this up it is supported by the text--if you have a copy handy you could check it yourself--in Catcher in the Rye these shifts are always clustered around Holden's paranoid, psychosexual, masochistic fantasies. It shifts quite rapidly between Holden's general malaise and detailed, instructional fantasies of murder and suffering.
So it seems possible that Catcher in the Rye speaks in a particular way to violent paranoid schizophrenics. Maybe it makes them violent? Mark David Chapman, famously, but James Earl Ray, who was not what you'd call an avid reader, also owned a copy. Salinger himself is kind of a lunatic, and certainly had some nefarious connections at the time he wrote the book. |
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