Postwar fiction

JEROME DAVID SALINGER (1919-2010) was of Jewish origin but without ties to the Jewish culture, in fact, he became a follower of Zen Buddhism. The Catcher in the Rye (1951) was the most censored book and the second most, his only novel as he wrote short stories and novellas like Nine Stories (1953) and Franny and Zooey (1961). The challenges begin with frequent use of vulgar language, sexual references, blasphemy, undermining of family values and moral codes, Holden's being a poor role model, encouragement of rebellion and promotion of drinking, smoking, lying, and promiscuity.

The story commences in with Holden Caulfield, the seventeen-year-old protagonist, addressing the readers directly from a mental hospital in southern California. He wants to tell us about events that took place over a two-day period the previous December 1949. It is a long flashback. Holden begins at an exclusive private school in Pennsylvania when he managed to lose the team's equipment on the subway that morning, resulting in the cancellation of a match. He criticizes him schoolmates for being superficial, as he would say, "phony." He is on his way to the home and drops to say his history teacher goodbye and assure him that he holds no grudge for his bad grade from history. The thing is that Holden has been expelled. He has a quarrel with his roommates and they fight but as he has enough of them, he catches a train to New York where he plans to stay in a hotel until Wednesday, when his parents expect him to return home for Christmas vacation. After observing the behaviour of the "perverts" in the hotel room facing his, he struggles with his own sexuality. He spends an evening dancing with three tourist women in their thirties in the hotel lounge but ends up with only the check. He remembers his younger sister Phoebe who was very reasonable and could appreciate good movies.

Following a disappointing visit to the nightclub, Holden agrees with a liftboy to have a prostitute,  visit his room. His attitude toward the prostitute changes the minute she enters the room, because she seems to be about the same age as Holden and starts to view her as a person. Holden becomes uncomfortable and when he tells her that all he wants to do is talk, she becomes annoyed with him and leaves. However, he still pays her for her time. She and the liftboy return to Holden's hotel room and demand more money than was originally agreed upon. Despite the fact that she takes money, the liftboy punches Holden in the stomach. Holden telephones Sally and agrees to meet her that afternoon to go to a play. At the train station he meets two nuns, one an English teacher, with whom he discusses Romeo and Juliet. After seeing the play with Sally the two go skating and while drinking coke Holden impulsively invites Sally to run away with him but she declines. Holden remarks: "You give me a royal pain in the ass, if you want to know the truth." Holden gives up, leaves her there, endures a movie and gets very drunk. Throughout the novel, Holden has been worried about the ducks in the lagoon at Central Park and how they endure winter. He tries to find them but only manages to break Phoebe's recording, a gift for her, he bought in the process. Exhausted physically and mentally, he heads home to see his sister.

He sneaks into his parents' apartment to visit Phoebe who is the only person with whom he seems to be able to communicate. Holden and Phoebe are close friends as well as siblings. She finds out Holden was expelled and is afraid of their father's reaction. Holden shares a fantasy he has been thinking about. He pictures himself as the sole guardian of numerous children playing in a huge rye field on the edge of a cliff. His job is to catch the children if they come close to falling off = to be a "catcher in the rye." Because of this misinterpretation, Holden believes that to be a "catcher in the rye" means to save children from losing their innocence. Holden drops by to see a former and much admired English teacher Mr. Antolini. He tells Holden that it is the mark of the mature man to live humbly for a cause, rather than die nobly for it. This is at odds with Holden's ideas of becoming a "catcher in the rye," a heroic figure who symbolically saves children from "falling off a cliff" and being exposed to the evils of adulthood. Holden is upset when he wakes up in the night to find Mr. Antolini making a homosexual advance. Holden later wonders if his interpretation of Mr. Antolini's actions as homosexual was correct and seems to wonder how much it matters anyway.

Holden makes the decision that he will head out west and live as a deaf-mute. He visits his sister´s school and is irritated by immoral inscriptions everywhere, wondering how children react to it. When he mentions the plan to his little sister she decides she wants to go with him but Holden refuses. This upsets Phoebe so Holden decides not to leave after all. Holden takes her to the Central Park Zoo and he is filled with happiness at the sight of Phoebe riding the carousel in the rain. At the conclusion of the novel, Holden mentions getting sick, living in a mental hospital and mentions that he will be attending another school in September. Holden surprisingly finds himself missing his roommates. He warns the reader that telling others about their own experiences will lead them to miss the people who shared them.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1899-1977) was a multilingual Russian author and a chess composer. Nabokov's first novels were in Russian, then in English. He wrote a memoir Speak, Memory (1951) and his most famous work is Lolita.(1955) Other acclaimed novel Pale Fire is postmodern (1962).

Lolita is narrated by Humbert Humbert, a literary scholar born in 1910, who is obsessed with young girls, whom he refers to as nymphets. Humbert suggests that this obsession results from the death of his childhood sweetheart Annabel. They were both crazy in love, 14-years-old, but she died so he is maybe forever looking for her, frozen in her young age as he remembers her. After an unsuccessful marriage, Humbert moves to a small New England town in 1947 to write his book about French literature as he is a university teacher. He should have lived in a relative´s house but it burned down so he rents a room in the house of Charlotte, a widow. Humbert meets her 12-year-old daughter, Dolores (also known as Dolly, Lolita, Lola, Lo), with whom—partially due to her uncanny resemblance to Annabel—he immediately becomes infatuated. Humbert stays at the house only to remain near her. He closely watches her and writes a diary. Mother does not like Dolores as she is hyperactive and plans to send to boarding school.

While Lolita is away at summer camp, Charlotte, who has fallen in love with Humbert, tells him that he must either marry her or move out. Humbert agrees to marry Charlotte in order to continue living near Lolita and even plans to drown Charlotte but cannot do it. Humbert gives her sleeping pills so that he does not have to have sex. Charlotte discovers his lust for Lolita when she reads his diary he had locked in the table. Charlotte plans to flee with Lolita and threatens to expose Humbert. Fate intervenes on Humbert's behalf, however; as she runs across the street in a state of shock to send letters, Charlotte is killed by a passing car. Humbert picks Lolita up from camp, pretending that Charlotte is ill. Lolita teases him that she was unfaithful and she kisses him. Rather than return to Charlotte's home he takes Lolita to a hotel. Humbert gives her sleeping pills and leaves her in their room. He wanders through the hotel and meets a man (later revealed to be Clare Quilty a playwright), who seems to know who he is. Humbert excuses himself from the strange conversation of innuendoes and returns.

There, he attempts to molest Lolita. Next morning, she herself initiates sex! He discovers that he is not her first lover, that she had sex with a boy at that camp. She makes fun of him, remarking she will call the police. Later, Humbert reveals to Lolita that Charlotte is actually dead; Lolita now has no choice but to accept her stepfather for she has "absolutely nowhere else to go." He also points out that if he was to go to jail, Lolita would probably end up in care. Lolita and Humbert drive around the country, moving from motel to motel. Later he bribes her for sexual favours, though he knows that she does not shares his love. After a year touring, the two settle down in another New England town, where Lolita is enrolled in the girls school that stresses practical things: dance, theatre and dating. Humbert is very possessive and strict, forbidding Lolita to take part in after-school activities or to associate with boys; most of the townspeople, however, see this as the action of a loving and concerned old-fashioned parent.

Lolita begs to be allowed to take part in the school play; Humbert reluctantly grants his permission in exchange for more sexual favours. The play is written by Clare Quilty. Just before opening night, Lolita and Humbert have a ferocious argument since she skipped her piano classes and Lolita runs away. He searches frantically until he finds her telephoning. She is in a bright, pleasant mood, saying that a "great decision has been made." Lolita tells Humbert she wants to resume their travels but choose destinations herself. Humbert gets the feeling that their car is being tailed and he becomes paranoid, suspecting that Lolita is conspiring to escape. She falls ill and must convalesce in a hospital. One night, Lolita disappears from the hospital; the staff tell Humbert that Lolita's "uncle" checked her out. Humbert embarks upon a frantic search to find Lolita and her abductor, but eventually gives up after some months without clues.

During this time, Humbert has a two year relationship with an adult women who dies when Humbert receives a letter from Lolita, now 17, who tells him that she is married to Dick, pregnant and in desperate need of money. Humbert goes to see Lolita. She reveals the truth: Clare Quilty, an acquaintance of Charlotte's and the writer of the school play, checked her out of the hospital and attempted to make her star in one of his pornographic films (he was also paedophile pervert); when she refused, he threw her out. She worked odd jobs before meeting her husband who knows nothing about her past. Humbert asks Lolita to leave Dick and live with him, to which she refuses. He gives her a large sum of money anyway. As he leaves she smiles and shouts goodbye in a "sweet, American" way. Humbert finds Quilty at his mansion; he intends to kill him, but first wants him to understand why he must die; he took advantage of a sinner (Humbert), he took advantage of a disadvantage. Eventually, Humbert shoots him several times throughout which Quilty is bargaining for his life in a witty, though bizarre, manner). Once Quilty has died, Humbert exits the house. Shortly after, he is arrested for driving on the wrong side of the road. The narrative closes with Humbert's final words to Lolita in which he wishes her well, and reveals the memoirs of his life to be published after he and Lolita have both died. According to the novel's fictional Foreword, Humbert dies of coronary thrombosis upon finishing his manuscript. Lolita dies giving birth in 1952. 

War fiction

JOSEPH HELLER (1923-1999) became famous for his novel Catch-22 (1961) is set during World War II in the Air Force. One pilot wants fulfil his flying missions soon so he does not get killed, yet his commander's aim is to continue raising the number of required missions in order to impress the superiors. He uses paragraph's 22 unfair illogical rules to keep the men flying.

NORMAN MAILER (1923-2007) claims in The Naked and the Dead (1948) that in the war there are no heroes. All characters are exposed to death, losing emotions and shows people who misuse the power they obtain. The Armies of the Night (1959) is an anti-war documentary, nonfiction novel.

WILLIAM STYRON (1925-2006) is best known for his Sophie´s Choice (1979) that deals with the Holocaust but the main protagonist is surprisingly Jewish. Sophie tells about her life over the past decade: she was a daughter of a university professor living with her two children in Warsaw after her father and husband are murdered; and of her imprisonment at Auschwitz. Because she survived, Sophie is ashamed of her father’s fascist beliefs and guilt-ridden for having helped with his pamphlet advocating the extermination of the Jews, for failing to protect her children, and for using her father’s views as an argument to obtain her freedom from the camp.

Sci-fi

KURT VONNEGUT (1922-2007) is labelled as a sci-fi writer but he said he is writing only stories about machines and men. He often criticizes political regimes. Among his first books is a sci-fi The Sirens of Titan (1959) that takes place in the 22nd century and the protagonist is the richest man in America with extraordinary luck.

Cat´s Cradle (1963) is about a scientist who invents a chemical that can turn water into ice. A dictator of a fictional island and his young American follower interested in eastern religions want that chemical. However, the scientists accidentally drops it, all water on planet turns ice = the end of the world.

The last thing he published was an essay A Man Without a Country (2005) where he criticize Bush´s administration and development in America.

In the short story EPICAC the mathematician falls in love with his colleague Pat and convinces her to marry him. Pat refuses, stating he is not poetic. The narrator asks EPICAC's opinion, a super computer he works with. EPICAC initially does not understand the terms such as girl, love and poetry. Once the narrator provides EPICAC with proper dictionary definitions, EPICAC generates a poem. The narrator takes this poem and passes it off as his own. Pat is so delighted that she and the narrator kiss for the first time. Later on, the narrator asks EPICAC for a marriage proposal poem. The narrator realizes that EPICAC has fallen in love with Pat and tries to explain to EPICAC that Pat cannot love a computer. Pat accepts the marriage proposal but adds that for every anniversary, the narrator must write her another poem.  

The next the narrator discovers that EPICAC destroyed itself, committing suicide because it could not be with the woman it loved because of the term the narrator called fate that does not have a solution. It did, however, leave a marriage present, 500 love poems. The narrator now has enough anniversary poems to keep his vow to Pat for centuries to come. It is a ironical story, Pat falls in love with EPICAC´s poetry, not the narrator´s, otherwise, she would not marry this boring man. In fact, EPICAC is copying Renaissance poetry but is not that well since he calculated database words and combine non-poetic things, it is just that Pat as a mathematician cannot recognize good poetry. The narrator is very cruel – even though he calls EPICAC his friend, he does not care about his feelings and takes an advantage of him.

2BR02B is a sci-fi short story from future where there are no prisons, no slums, no poverty and no diseases. People can live forever but the problem is that new born children can be born only if somebody willingly make a space for them since the planet would be overpopulated without this law. Because of that, not many children are born since only a few people want to die. The protagonist is a man whose wife expects triplets. This poses a huge problem as he has only one volunteer to die so only one child can survive.

There is a telephone number whose number it 2BR02B where people who wish to die call for assisted suicide. Hostesses who help with suicides are usually beautiful but for some reason after some years working in the field grow moustaches. The constant assisting death had an effect on them, dehumanized them to the extent they are enthusiastic about their work. The doctor who invented immortality praises women like these hostesses since without them this world would be impossible. When the triplets are born and father is faced by the choice which one to save, he kills the inventor and the hostess and then himself to make the room for the new life.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is about soldiers who survived Dresden in WW2. Vonnegut spent 20 years thinking how to write a war novel and say how nonsensical it was so he titled it Children´s Crusade as many soldiers were hardly adult men. 

A writer wants to write a book about his war experience in Dresden and goes to meet his pal to vivid his memories. Pal's wife sees the war as children´s crusade since many recruits were only young boys. The writer then writes a sci-fi war story: Billy Pilgrim is an optician. At the age of 46, he publicly reveals he is able to travel in his timeline in split second (without control) and that he met little green aliens from planet Tralfamadore (mentioned also in The Sirens of Titan) who are able to perceive the world in four dimensions. For them time is not fixed and death does not mean anything since one is dead only in one point and fine in another. Billy claims that first he travelled in Germany 1944 during the war, even before his abduction which happened in 1967. He meets a disgusting lad Weary who is interested in history of torture but saves Billy all the time since Billy cannot even fight properly as a student optician. Billy experiences several time travels, to his death, birth, etc. Later on, he and Weary are captured by Germans and Billy experiences another travels to the time he is already an optician.

Billy asks aliens why they chose him and they answers that is a human question since there is no why. They just do things because they must. According to them only Earthians speak of free will. In fact, Billy had already adopted an laid-back approach: “So it goes.” Billy is put into zoo where alien visitors watch him and ask him questions like if he is happy in zoo. He answers that it is the same as on Earth. Later on, he gets a movie star as his mate. Among the alien race, there are six genders needed for reproduction. Billy discovers that universe ends with some Tralfamadorian who fails at new fuel experiment. They know it but they cannot change it as that moment is a fixed event in time. Aliens tell him that Earhtians should learn to overlook unpleasant things. Billy has already seen his death many times, knows where, when, and how he will be killed: he is shot after his speech about flying saucers and the true nature of time before a large audience in 1976. The Germans put Billy and his fellow prisoners in a disused slaughterhouse in Dresden. Their building is known as "Slaughterhouse number 5". Billy already knows Dresden will be destroyed soon. Later on, his mate in zoo gets pregnant. Billy meets his favourite (but unpopular) sci-fi writer who wrote also about a pair of humans abducted by aliens and put into zoo. The novel ends with bird´s pip.

RAY BRADBURY (1920-2012) was a sci-fi writer whose work is not considered a classic of sci-fi genre. He is best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) depicting the world where books are outlawed and being burned. The Martian Chronicles (1950) is a collection of loosely connected sci-fi and horror stories. Another known books are The Illustrated Man (1951) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962).

ISAAC ASIMOV (1920-1992) is considered to be the master of sci-fi, especially famous for his Robot series and space opera Foundation series. His most famous book is I, Robot (1950) that was adapted into a film.

The Beat Generation novelists and hippies

JACK KEROUAC (1922-1969) acted as a spokesman for the Beat Generation. He believed they are a religious movement and revived automatic writing popular that was popular in surrealism circles in 1920s in Parish as he did not approve of  pre-prepared composition. His chars are drug addicts, alcoholics and criminals but what makes them the Beat characters is that they for spirituality.

His first major work is The Town and the City (1950) but his most famous novel is legendary On the Road (1957). It is autobiographical work based on the real road trip he took with Neal Cassady. He wrote book on a kitchen table in 20 days on role of a telegraph paper and send it to the publisher.

WILLIAM BURROUGHS (1914-1997) was gay which reflected especially in his work The Naked Lunch (1959). He was called to the trial for obscenity but it worked also as a negative advert which gained him followers. The novel was actually structured by Ginsberg who found scraps of papers in Burroughs's room, put them together and tried to compose a book. That is why the story is not linear story but rather 21 satirical pieces dealing with horror-like reality. Junkie: Confession of an Unredeemed Drug Addict dealt with his experience of a drug addict. Queer (1985).

KEN KESEY (1935-2001) was a hippie, friend with LSD guru Timothy Leary and he even tested drugs in a hospital where he described how he felt. After he had a vision of an Indian sweeping the floor, he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). At Veterans' Hospital Kesey often spent time talking to the patients, sometimes under the influence of the hallucinogenic drugs. Kesey did not believe that these patients were insane, but rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to behave. Sometimes a Great Notion (1964).

Minimalism

Minimalism is a movement in various forms of art and design where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features and core self expression. It is identified with development in post-WW2 western art. Literary minimalism is characterised by an economy with words and a focus on surface description. Characters of minimalist stories tend to be the most average people, featuring slice of life. On the surface nothing significant happens, the readers expect something more, some hidden meaning but in minimalist it is simply not there.

RAYMOND CARVER (1938-1988) focused on the sadness of the everyday lives of ordinary people. His characters are often lost and represent inner lives of the working poor in the 1970s. Anyone can lose everything anytime – not only material possession but also family and trust. Carver himself took up many obscure jobs and his subject matter focused on blue-collar workers reflects his own experience. Another theme of his work is alcoholism and recovery as both Carver and his father were alcohol addicts. His first published story war The Furious Seasons (1961) and his collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) became one of the best short stories books.

Vitamins is a short story about a married couple where a wife Patti takes a job to sell vitamins door-to-door just to do something in her life for self-respect. She becomes very successful, unlike other girls who quit after some time or immediately. Her colleague Sheila falls in love with her but Patti refuses her, simply stating she does not swing that way. Sheila leaves after that and Patti does not even question her departure, even though she liked her very much as a friend. Patti admits she never imagined herself to be selling vitamins in her life and contemplates her effort to sell vitamins to sickly people who think they do not need them. She calls herself to be her “own best customer” as she takes the pills she sells and accuses her husband of not caring about her at all. These days, she sells and restocks vitamins even in her sleep-dreams. The husband, who is a narrator of the story, just drink alcohol and makes no real statement about anything. The husband goes secretly on a date with another colleague of Patti, Donna. Donna says she want to quit vitamin business as there is no future in it. After being insulted in a pub by some of husband’s acquaintances who do not approve of cheating, they part their ways. Upon returning home, the husband finds his wife who sleepwalks, dreaming of selling vitamins.

JOHN CHEEVER (1912-1982) is best remembered for his short stories like The Enormous Radio (1947) and The Swimmer.(1964). He wrote also some novels like Bullet Park (1969).

The Worm in the Apple is a critic of psychoanalysis of Freud. The sceptical narrator is trying to find some “worm” in the “apple” of the Crutchmans family as they seem to be too perfect to be true = there must be a hidden problem! They are wealthy thanks to Helen who is active in charity but maybe confuses money with emotional independence. She is a typical housewife and appears to be jealous of her daughter Rachel but in fact there is nothing wrong with their relationship. Larry still has nightmares from the Navy but works even though he does not have to. The worm is in the eye of narrator and his observation that tries to find faults were there are not But the family is not totally perfect, for instance Rachel gets pregnant early but they solve things normally and naturally which disturbs the narrator even more. The narrator is obviously frustrated, constantly observers, looking for faults, even necrofilic. It shows an irony of American suburbs where people want to hear bad stuff about their neighbours to feel better.

New Journalism

New Journalism is a name give to a style of 1960-70s to journalism which used literary techniques unconventional at that time. The term was codified by TOM WOLFE in a 1973 collection of journalism articles The New Journalism. This style tended to be found rather in magazines and is characterises by telling the story using the scene, full dialogues, third-person point of view and recordings of everyday details. Despite these features, New Journalism is not fiction and maintains elements of reporting. To get inside the head of a character, the journalist asks the subject what they were thinking or how they felt during the incident.

TRUMAN CAPOTE (1924-1984) wrote In Cold Blood (1966) when inspired by an article about the unexplained murder of a farmer family who were shot dead in their home. There were no signs of struggle and nothing was stolen. Fascinated by this article, Capote visited the scene of the massacre and became acquainted with everyone involved in the investigation and most of the residents of the small town. This “non-fiction novel” as Capote labelled it, brought him literary acclaim, even though some questioned certain events as reported in the book, therefore Capote rather achieved art.

His short story Miriam (1945) is about an elderly lady Mrs Miriam Miller, living alone in an apartment after her husband’s death. She is extremely ordinary, the neighbours hardly know of her existence. One day she encounters a mysterious beautiful girl who asks her to buy her a cinema ticket.  That would be normally the end of it, however, the girl (whose name is also Miriam) suddenly visits Mrs Miller’s apartment, even though there is no way she could have find it. The girl scared Mrs Miller and she even becomes paranoiac. When the girl Miriam turns up again, claiming she is going to live with her now, brining a huge box with her clothes, Mrs Miller dashes to her neighbours. But the neighbour finds nobody in her apartment so Mrs Miller returns, thinking she must have imagined all that. Sitting on the chair, Miriam returns.

Afro-American prose

After WW2 situation in America changed with protests against segregation and Americans started to be interested in literature of minorities.

RALPH ELLISON (1914-1994) was a friend of Richard Wright who helped him to be published. His only novel Invisible Man (1952) was like a black Moby-Dick as a protagonist does not have a name. It became a metaphor for blacks´ position in America since they were ignored.

JAMES BALDWIN (1924-1984) dealt also with the role of religion as Christianity played a dominant part in Afro-American culture. He was very critical of it since he grew up in orthodox family and said it is not their religion as the whites forced it on them. The Fire Next Time (1963) are critical essays, criticized America for producing stereotypical image of blacks like a slave Jim in Huckleberry Finn (who is not very bright and not independent) and Uncle Tom´s Cabin (a black love his master and does not criticizes his conditions). Baldwin said enough of it!