The Catcher in the Rye vs. The Bell Jar

Catcher in the Rye is a great adolescent book written for adolescents. It is sloping and uncomfortable and ragged and cold and weird.

The Bell Jar is the best! 100 pages of tensest conformity followed by an absolute rapture of lucid madness. Read The Bell Jar. Read The Bell JAR.

Yeah my thoughts are close to that. The Bell Jar is just very original and powerful.

The Bell Jar survives being reread when you're an adult, but Catcher needs to be read at just the right time, I reckon, or else it loses a lot of its power.

No 'Grow.Up.' option?

Other than this, though, they are not all that similar

they both have pretty good look-at-me opening sentences

Loved both as a young teen, suspect, as others have said, the Bell Jar would be the one that stood the test of time. Might actually give it a reread soon, as it has been so long since I read either I'm kind of loath to vote now.

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

the great thing about esther greenwood as a protagonist is that as cruel and callow as she can be at times, she is also incredibly wise. living "in the bell jar" -- or being severely depressed -- allows her to see things much more clearly than her peers. but still, the novel still doesn't glamorize depression a bit. you never want anything more, the whole time, than for her to get better. survival is sort of more important than oriiginality and insight in the end, and it's the thing she can' t do. (until the very end, after the successful electroshock therapy of course.)

think of catcher in the rye any time i get maudlin about the innocence of youth, or wh3en i see a duck pond
think of bell jar anytime i am supremely depressed and want to be dead, or when i think about work at fashion magazines, or tuberculosis, or putting grape jelly in an avocado

bell jar ALSO anytime i drink vodka straight!! or see a roll of carpet

yessss so many little observational details are just so well rendered you can't forget them

it's just a brilliant book. i have only read some of plath's poetry but i think i am going to read ariel this summer

I can't vote here, I love both of these too much

CITR is a different, and maybe better, book when you reread it as an adult, or at least it was for me. ppl always remember holden's bluster, but when i come back to the book it's his sheer fragility and lostness that stands out. feels like a much sadder book to me than the bell jar (which i also luv).

interesting. holden obviously doesn't encounter the outer reaches of misery -- where it becomes a mortal illness -- the way esther does, but he doesn't have the same capacity to understand and (perhaps) get through his situation that esther does, so i could see how the book could seem even bleaker. for me, the bell jar was a much more upsetting reading experience.

catcher also much funnier when read as an adult. last i read it (~15yrs ago) i also remember more distance, more irony, less sense of identification between author and protagonist than how it's generally considered, i think.

Catcher hit me hard as a teenager. The Bell Jar I read later, in my mid-20s, and I loved it. In my 40s, I re-read Catcher with trepidation, expecting to hate it. But I thought it held up extremely well, despite a certain sentimentalism I hadn't particularly noticed as a teenager. I've yet to re-read The Bell Jar, so I can't say.

On another note, it's over six years since Salinger died, and not a peep about the six or seven novels he supposedly had locked up in his vault in his Cornish hideaway, I wonder what the story is there. Surely his executors have had a look by now. Strange nothing has leaked out.

http://www.blogto.com/listings/cafes/upload/2010/04/2010417-belljar-menu.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Wxvz8O9.jpg

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