“I despised this book the first couple of times I read it. Who was this whiner narrator? What's with the red hunting cap? But when I had to read it for a graduate writing class, the instructor juxtaposed it with the seed for this novel, a short story written in third person--"Slight Rebellion Off Madison" -- which appeared in The New Yorker in December 1942. Most writers who get something published in The New Yorker would declare it done, but not Salinger. He shifts the whole thing into first person and builds a novel out of it. The comparison between the short story and the scene as it appears in the book opened the novel up to me. I'm no great fan of Holden Caufield, but I greatly admire Salinger's use of spatial relations and gesture to get the story across--especially the scene in the bathroom with Stradlater.”
