J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [23]
Home from Pencey Prep on Christmas vacation, Holden Caulfield takes his girlfriend, Sally Hayes, on a date, first to the theater and then ice skating at Rockefeller Center. At the skating rink, Holden begins to drink and offers a tirade on the things he claims to hate: his school, theaters, newsreels, and the Madison Avenue bus. In an effort to avoid convention, Holden asks Sally to run away to New England with him. “We’ll live somewhere with a brook and stuff,” he tells her. “… Then, later on, we’ll get married or something.” When Sally refuses, Holden goes to a bar to get drunk and then sulks in the bathroom, where he encounters the barroom piano player. “Why don’t you go home, kid?” the piano player asks. “Not me,” Holden mutters. “Not me.”35
Encountering “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” present-day readers are sometimes tempted to dismiss it as an unpolished chapter of The Catcher in the Rye. Although the story contains characters and events familiar to readers of the novel, its tone and feel are foreign to it. The Holden Caulfield of Catcher and the Holden Caulfield of “Slight Rebellion” are driven by different motivations, a difference that changes not only the story’s characters but also its primary message. Stylistically, “Slight Rebellion” is stiff and its characters purposely deadpan. Its Holden Caulfield is distant, with a third-person voice far removed from the reader. Produced at a time when Salinger’s writing wavered between the thoughtful and the commercial, it stands somewhere in between and has as much in common with “The Young Folks” as with The Catcher in the Rye.
The driving force of the story is Holden’s pronouncements on the things he claims to hate, a scotch-drenched litany later repeated in the novel but whose vehemence and self-derision are stronger in the short story. In “Slight Rebellion,” Holden appears as a typical well-heeled teenager doing the ordinary things any upper-middle-class boy might do. Salinger emphasizes the point by noting that girls often thought they saw him shopping in the city when in fact it was someone else. Yet, beneath his conventional facade, Holden seethes with discontent and longs to escape the world in which he feels entrapped.
By portraying Holden’s dissatisfaction and rebellion against what is expected of him, Salinger reveals the tumult that often simmers beneath the surface of individuals in real life. Like the later Holden of Catcher, the Holden of “Slight Rebellion” is torn in opposite directions, one of fulfilling expectations and one of rebellion. In the predictable world of Sally Hayes, there is nothing more commonplace than trimming the tree at Christmas. Although Holden protests against conformity, he is repeatedly drawn to Sally’s request that he help her trim the tree. He is attracted to the ritual as a comfort, despite its conventionality. At the same time as disdaining ordinary life, he is still desperate to be accepted into it.
The end of the story contains a neat ironic twist when we find Holden cold and drunk, waiting for the very Madison Avenue bus he loathes so much. If this story contains any autobiographical comment, it is to be found within this final scene, where Holden so clearly yearns for the very things he claims to hate. Containing an element of self-derision, “Slight Rebellion” portrays an individual trapped by the limitations of his own experience. Holden, like his creator, might scorn the mundane, but that is all he knows. In fact, that is what has come to define him. Sally Hayes, a character who resembles Oona O’Neill, is presented as being shallow and concerned only with fashionable traditions. She is comfortable.