'Catcher in the Rye' and 'Vernon God Little' - Comparison between classic and contemporary novel of initiation

Comparison between classic and contemporary novel of initiation

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2004 im Fachbereich Anglistik - Literatur, Note: 2,0, Universität Potsdam, 5 + 6 online Quellen im Literaturverzeichnis, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Vernon God Little' was written in 2003 by D.B.C. Pierre. It won The Man Booker Prize in in the same year. Since the novel about the teenager Vernon Little has its setting in the United States, in Texas, to be more precise in a small town by the name of Martirio, one might assume it was written by an American author. Additionally, Finlay was already an internationally published cartoonist and designer before he started writing his novel. 'Vernon God Little' is a contemporary satire on American society in its first decade of the new millenium. Furthermore, it can be categorized as a novel of initiation.Its protagonist Vernon Little finds himself in the blurry state of a teenager- not yet a real grown up man, neither a boy, only just starting to be confronted with life´s realities. Because of its recent date of publication there is no secondary literature on 'Vernon God Little' to be found. There are articles on the web that did provide me with at least some background information. Why these two novels? 'The Catcher in the Rye' is probably the greatest classic of novels about adolsecents in American post-war literature. The novel became mandatory reading and was included in reading lists of schools and colleges. It was very successful even in Korea and Israel, was forbidden in Australia and became a mandatory lpart of the curriculum in German schools. (vgl. Neis 1982, 8-9) Its reception was and still is, coined by controversy. Its critics have felt offended by the liberalism and the obvious social critcism that Salinger´s work conveys. There are still, more than fifty years after its first being publishied, new ways of interpreting Catcher. These two novels have certain fundamental similarities. On the one hand, they both share a fairly critical outlook on the society of the time they are written in. On the other, the observer in both cases is a boy at the brink of society to the adult world. This means, subject and object in both novels share the same formal outline - I intend to compare these outlines and figure out if the classic and the newcomer have the same shape. Since The Catcher in the Rye is widely known novel I will not discuss or reproduce its contents. Instead, I will concentrate on and offer insight into D.B.C. Pierre´s 'Vernon God Little' in the first part of my work, then I will compare the two novels.