The persistent pursuit of childhood innocence in Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis and Jerome David Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye

Abstract EN

The research , as its title indicates .

deals with two literary works that share the same idea which is going back in continuous pursuit of childhood innocence .

Though these two works are in common .

their authors approach this very idea differently .

Franz Kafka , a European novelist .

deals with this subject from a psychological as well as a naturalistic point of view , showing how living in a modem merciless mechanical world makes man lose his human worth - a situation that makes him , as Gregor Samsa in Kafka's novella , Metamorphosis ( 1912 ) .

who returns symbolically to a more infantile and primitive state in the form of a cockroach .

dreams of going back to the stage of childhood where he can be far awTay from the burden of responsibility .

the kind of responsibility that a person is going to afford when moving to the adolescent stage .

Jerome D.

Salinger .

an American writer in the 1930s , approaches it from a psychological point of view , showing how difficult it is for Holden Caulfield .

the hero of his novel .

The Catcher in the Rye ( 1951 ) and the representative of what is called " the sensitive young " 1 man , to cope with the vulgar American adult society and its economic values.

The research makes clear how the society he finds himself in makes linn suffer from countless psychological troubles that put him in front of two undesirable choices : either to lose his identity in adjusting to the American society's values or to enter a psychoanalytic institution wrhere he is to be treated as an insane child .Not assimilating the American cultare and its corrupted values and acting according to his own moral ones instead .

he is defeated by his society and is forced to choose the second alternative choice .-