Date of Award

2009

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Dimino, Andrea

Keywords

American Literature, Salinger, J.D., Identity, Alexie, Sherman, Diaz, Junot, Contemporary Literature, Masculinity

Area of Concentration

Literature

Abstract

Many contemporary novelists explore a complex notion of identity. In these texts, characters create and recreate their identities, responding to the forces of their social world. I examine J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1945), Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (1996) and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) following their young male protagonists in their search for a sense of identity. This thesis first explores the various strategies and tactics employed by the characters in the process of creating their identity: language, the search for community, sexuality, and violence. The success of each of these strategies varies for each individual character: Díaz’s Yunior, for example, uses several styles of slang in order to enact an identity that maintains many facets of his sense of self, yet characters in Indian Killer and The Catcher in the Rye find themselves caught in linguistic worlds that are too narrow and inflexible. I include a discussion of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) in order to explore what it looks like when one of these identification strategies overrides the others, in this case, violence. Next, I discuss the relationship between these characters and their social worlds; each character faces policing from their community in an attempt to control the type of identity that is allowed for young men. I use the work of Michel Foucault and D. A. Miller to understand the policing mechanisms of these novelistic worlds, from the normalizing world of upper-class boarding schools to the culture of panopticism within the Dominican American community as a result of the Trujillo regime. How could characters maintain a multiplicity of identities in order to partially avoid this policing? To answer this question, the third chapter draws heavily on the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and her concepts of mestiza consciousness and nepantlerism. I also examine other characters from The Catcher in the Rye and Indian Killer in order to see if they can employ a multiple identity model in the world they share with the main characters, and I include a discussion of the border-crossing character Wittman from Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey (1989). As represented in these novels, identity is not a firm category but rather an idea that is ever-changing, allowing for social policing but also personal growth.

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