Catcher’s literary value is almost totally invested in the symbology that is Holden Caulfield. Holden’s seemingly misguided adventures and expressed apathy with unavoidable phonies points towards a much larger human condition that all readers can appreciate in varying degrees.
The Ilych novella was Tolstoy’s first work of fiction proceeding an incredible emotional struggle laden with deep existential questions and heavy bouts of depression. Tolstoy’s personal struggle with the unavoidable awareness of humanity’s fragile mortality and the ultimate meaning of a seemingly transient but very personal existence was finally resolved by his conversion to a radical expression of Christianity.
Stephen Crane’s The Open Boat is the story of four ship-wrecked men struggling for survival against forces well beyond their control. Their ship sunk, the cook, the correspondent, the oiler and the captain are forced to float their lifeboat close enough to land to see it, but far enough away to escape the sharp, rough, crushing and ice-cold waves and surf guarding it.
Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe does incredible justice to the Faust myth in his own Dr. Faustus. Dr. Faustus is a poem (blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter) about a learned, intellectual, German scholar who sells his soul to the devil in effort to gain ultimate wisdom and the ultimate power accompanying it.
Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is so much more than an entertaining novel; it is a philosophical and theological fable built upon a conceptual struggle between good, evil, and our God-given and human ability to choose one over the other freely.
Long before they go to school, before they even know the alphabet, children begin to write. In fact, for most children, literacy begins at home … with a crayon.