샐린저 소설 연구 : 「에즈메를 위하여-사랑과 비열」을 중심으로 = A Study of D. Salinger´s "For Esme-with Love and Squalor"

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The purpose of this study is to analyze the characteristics of J. D. Salinger's fiction, "For Esme-with Love and Squalor." This is a story of war and marriage. To analyze this short story, characteristic attitudes from the most famous writer in modern war fiction, Ernest Hemingway are contrasted with attitudes from some works of J. D. Salinger.
Salinger's characters, like Hemingway's are given every conventional reason for despair and therefore for hardening defensively into a style of living. The important difference is that Hemingway shares in his character's despair while Salinger condemns it.
"For Esme-with Love and squalor" is the story of love and squalor. So it reveals beneath lyricism an unsentimental and philosophical attitude toward love and squalor as leading characters come to recognize their complexities and interdependency in their life.
The philosophical theory attitude of Salinger in "For Esme-with Love and Squalor" derive from Zen Buddhism. So it is essentially Zen-like in its acceptance of all natural behavior.
Esme encourages Sgt. X to aware how important love and squalor are and realize that love is impossible without squalor. Esme's relationship with squalor is not that of a protestor or one who sets up radical defenses but of a realist who can accept thing they are. Esme heartens Sgt. X to aware the necessity of squalor and he teaches the same in his story. Sgt. X, the main agent of squalor is saved, not from, but through squalor to become a normal man equipped with the ability of love for normal life.
The mid-story shift from first to third person narrator is justified by the rational of the story, as it often is not in early Salinger's fiction, because it has the vital structural function of putting distance between the narrator' as he is and as he was. Salinger is essentially a first-person writer. It seems that the disproportion is the story's final constructive irony providing the completed portrait of the narrator's mature perspective of war and squalor.
"For Esme-with Love and squalor" is the outstanding fiction which is full of Salinger's fictional art, and it remains one of Salinger's most admired works as the sixth in Nine Stories.