What Is The Loss Of Innocence In Nine Stories By J. D. Salinger

The youth were misguided. Of all of their childhood, they wanted to become more mature. Little did they knew that this could wreck their lives. Once their eyes were open to harsh universe this society called reality, they would never be the same. These were the thoughts that ran through J.D. Salinger’s imagination when he wrote the novel Nine Stories. During his existence, he gone through divorces, experimented with Buddhism, and served in the war. J.D. Salinger intertwined his life with his works in Nine Stories by giving Eloise a love she could not keep, adding Sybil in the midst of Seymour’s existence, and allowing Sergeant X to get a ray of sunshine to help him through his struggle.

The marriages in J.D. Salinger’s life and the short
Salinger spent much of his lifetime after the war taking an interest in religion. “His interest in religion spans his adult life” (Shmoop Editorial Team). Some of his beliefs were that peace and tranquility should be present in the world. Salinger also sensed that we all once had innocence when we were children. The way Salinger felt he could express this feeling was through his writing and he reflects the loss of peace and innocence in a Perfect Day for Bananafish. When Seymour was spending time with a child named Sybil, Seymour was content and had peace.The reader would be able to infer Seymour liked Sybil’s company because when Sybil asked why he hadn’t pushed another child named Sharon off the piano chair and Seymour told her it wouldn’t be right. “‘I’ll tell you what I did do, though.’ ‘what?’ ‘I pretended she was you’” (Salinger 13). Salinger used Sybil to represent the innocence in this work by making Sybil a child. When Sybil left Seymour, he felt as the peace and purity in the world had left and he immediately felt like he had to defend himself from the evil in the world. This may be the reason he felt attacked when the woman in the elevator was looking at his feet. “‘If you want to look at my feet, say so,’ said the young man. ‘But don’t be a God-damned sneak about it’” (Salinger 17). Seymour became overwhelmed because he felt the woman was trying to disrupt the peace in his life and as a buddhist, Salinger believed the world should have
D. Salinger’s writing career, he struggled a great amount. After he abandoned New York University’s Washington Square College, Salinger traveled to Europe for 8 months on the pretense of learning more about his father’s cheese and meat importing business. During his time in Europe, although he was educated about importing, he was also writing short stories and submitting them to American magazines for publication. Unfortunately for Salinger, none of his stories were accepted during his stint in Europe. After coming back to America, he briefly enrolled in Ursinus College, only to leave abruptly to begin two classes at Colombia University’s Extension Division so he could focus on his writing. He finally got his first publication with the short story, The Young Folk when the teacher of the two classes decided to publish the story in his magazine, Story. This time of struggle is similar to the hard time that the character Sergeant X, in the short story written by Salinger, For Esme- With Love and Squalor, goes through. After the war Sergeant X was described as, “a young man who had not come through the war with all his faculties intact.”(Salinger 104). Because of this, X is in bad shape and is very depressed when he finally gets a package from Esme. This package contains a watch that was her father’s from the war for X to use as a good luck, and a letter written to him from Esme. This gift and the letter reminded him that there was good in