Memory as a structural process in the short story “The Laughing Man” by J. D. Salinger

Abstract

Studying the narrator of the short story “The Laughing Man” (2019) by J. D. Salinger, this paper aims to analyse the way in which the contradictions in the narrative allows the reader to see the gaps in the memory of the one narrating, indicating a implicit wish to structure a unknown past through the narrative act. This will be studied along with the specificites of the literary language, observing the instances in which the memorialistic discourse and literary discourse overlap, allowing unique possibilities when representing not only the memories themselves, but also the way the narrator has access to these memories and how new ways of reading come from that. The paper is organized starting with as introduction, in which Salinger’s works are contextualized, a theorical discussion divided between two main categories – the relation between memory and literature, focused mainly in Henri Bergson (1999) and Giorgio Agamben (2014)/ previous studies about Salinger’s narrators, coming mainly form André Ferreira Gomes dos Santos (2013) and Adolfo Jose de Souza Frota (2008) – and a analysis in which the aspects we intend to study will be presented as they appear in the narrative, following a linear approach to the work. These theorical lines, added to the adopted approach, allowed us the interpretation that there is a double denial by the work’s narrator, which manifests itself in a thematical and express manner, as well as in a structural way, operating as a organizing principle to the events of the narrative.