I have officially completed the three coming of age novels we've focused on so far in class! I am, however, left with one question:
Are all coming of age novels quasi-memoirs?
It's definitely not a problem if that is the case or not, I'm just very curious. It is widely acknowledged that A Portrait of a Young Man is actually a portrait of the young James Joyce as reflected upon by his older self. We also talked about how The Bell Jar is a retelling of some of Sylvia Plath's struggle with mental illness around ten years after the episodic period that the book depicts. A Catcher in the Rye is not a retelling of J.D. Salinger's life, but we did talk about him vs D.B.; they both go by their initials, and Holden's view of D.B. selling himself to Hollywood is somewhat what Salinger thinks of himself. There's also the fact that Holden wanted to escape from a phony society and move to Vermont, and Salinger attempted to do the same and moved to New Hampshire (and to be honest I see both of those states as shades of the same exact place...).
It really does make sense, too, that coming of age novels would have memoir qualities, especially the ones we're reading. Writers use bits of themselves and their own experiences to turn words into stories, and so for a coming of age novel to be truly good it makes sense that the writer would use the experiences they had in that period of their lives. It makes it so that the novel will ring true to the reader, and be at least somewhat relatable.
The Catcher in the Rye did a great job of that actually; it's my favorite of the three books, and the only reason I don't have an entire post dedicated to it is because I wrote a reflective response paper and I'm paranoid about accidentally repeating what I'd said before. Still, Holden's narrative really makes the narrator feel special and like they're being entrusted with information no one else knows (although apparently D.B. knows...). Even though the book is old, the issues Holden struggled with are still present and relatable.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was probably my least favorite of the bunch mainly because I didn't feel that I could relate to Stephen a ton. Plus the abundance of religion was somewhat uncomfortable since I'm not even sure of what I believe in myself. The Bell Jar also has some tough themes to write and think about, simply because they are so relevant and I don't want to think about it. But I still did like The Bell Jar a lot, a good bit more than Portrait, because it's still relatable and I really felt like I got to know Esther as person while I feel like Stephen was just kinda there.
I don't know quite where I branched off, but I'm looking forward to seeing if the upcoming novels we will read also have deep and obvious connections to the author's experiences.
Going off of your first question, I think that up to a certain point coming of age novels are little memoirs because to really be able to convey something well, in most cases you must have understood/ experienced something similar. Also, I also have to say that I preferred The Catcher in the Rye for the same reasons you mentioned.
ReplyDeleteI sort of addressed this question on my first-day handout for the course: it's true that fictional representations of adolescence tend to reflect many details from the author's own experience (and this is even true of a book I used to teach in this course, written by a man, Jonathan Lethem, in which the main character is a girl who ends up living in a new colony on a distant planet inhabited by spontaneous-poet Snuffilupicus-style aliens!). There may be any number of explanations, but what else does an author have to draw upon when depicting the inner life of a teenager? Young people tend to forget (or not quite believe) that grown-ups have been through all this themselves, but I can attest that these years loom large in my own personal memory. Even a novel that isn't autobiographical in its primary intent likely draws on an author's personal experience of what it's like to be an adolescent.
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