《麦田守望者》与《挪威的森林》的艺术风格比较研究(4)

The influential literary works are different from each other because authors havedifferent styles of narrations and worldviews. Among many differences between thetwo novels, the following parts will only focus on the different narration, symbolismand styles of language.

1. Different Narrative Styles

A. Difference in the First Person Narration

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and Norwegian Wood are written in thefirst person. The first person narrative plays a very significant part in the readers’appreciation of the text. Although both novels have employed the first-personnarration, their narrative ways are quite different. Obviously, Holden is a positivenarrator instead of a passive stander-by in The Catcher in the Rye. He is involved ineverything that he narrates. He has a straightforward attitude towards everything,which totally suits his personality. Norwegian Wood begins with the recollections ofmiddle-aged Toru and then young Toru appears and becomes a protagonist. However,middle-aged Toru doesn’t quit his narration. We can feel his existence at all times.Actually, he becomes a commentator in some way. Compared with brief and simplenarration in The Catcher in the Rye, narration in Norwegian Wood is moredimensional and has a sense of time-travel.

As novel begins, the main character Holden Caulfield and Toru prepare to tell hisstory to the readers. As a result of the narrative the readers are also analysts toprotagonists and they address each reader who reads the novel in a very intimatemanner. The narrative always gets the readers to understand and see more clearly whyprotagonists have a nervous breakdown, which emphasizes how important it is to thereaders’ appreciation of the text.

The same difference between action and fantasy applies to Holden’s critique ofsociety, which is at times taken to stand for a reformist impulse, a wish for a betterworld. However, a careful examination of Holden’s aversions, complaints,observations, and especially his summarizations about the world reveals many ofthem to be individual. This is another way of saying that Holden is a first-person narrator of a particular kind. In novels with first-person narrators the commondifference is between the narrator’s reports of what he observes, which are reliableand his opinions, which are unreliable. With Holden, there is additionally a range ofreliability among his opinions relying on whom and what he is evaluating.

Conclusion

The “growing up” novels have always taken a vital place in the world literature,whether it is in the west or in the east. Salinger’s view of universe, in which all adults(even the most apparently decent) are corrupt and consequently destructive, is bleakand somewhat terrifying. Since growing up in the real world is tragic, in Salinger’sideal world time must be stopped to prevent the loss of childhood, to salvage theremnants of innocence. At one point in the novel, Holden wishes that life were aschangeless and pure as the exhibitions under glass cases in the Museum of NaturalHistory. This explains, in part, Holden’s ecstasy in the rain at the close of the novel. Inwatching Phoebe go round and round on the carrousel, in effect going nowhere, hesees her in the timeless continuum of art on the verge of changing, yet unchanging,forever safe, forever loving, forever innocent.

Norwegian Wood is a love story pervaded with adolescent melancholy andindifference and appalling tendency towards death. Toru and Naoko’s behavior can beseen as the pubertal version of sensual hedonism. They lost the ability to get into thelarge social reality. In Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, romance and coming-of-ageconfront the growing trend of postmodernity that leads to a discontinuity of life becomingmore and more common in post-war Japan. As the narrator struggles through amonotonous daily existence, the text gives the reader access to the narrator’s struggle forself-identity and societal identity. In the end, he finds his means of self-acceptancethrough escape. Murakami’s world is an allegorical one, constructed of familiarsymbols—an empty well, an underground city—but the meaning of those symbolsremains hermetic to the last. His debt to popular culture (and American pop culture, inparticular) notwithstanding, it could be argued that no author’s body of work has everbeen more private. Rejecting Japanese literature, art, and music at an early age,Murakami came to identify more and more closely with the world outside Japan, aworld he knew only through jazz records, Hollywood movies, and dime-storepaperbacks.

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