I'm just interested in finding out what the hell goes. I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet? What do you want -- some bastard with wavy hair? 
 Here we've got a pair of beautiful goddamned crises of the ego. It's easy to talk about Salinger like he's a period piece, like Norman Rockwell, greasers, or car fins, but he's really good and rhythmic here, with foaming mad dialogue and fearful trembling neurotics. 
 Salinger seems to me to be one of the main prophets of a sect of American Faiths and beliefs. I'm not necessarily referring an institutional organization or a church, like the Baptists or Catholics. Rather, there seems to be more of a focus on a certain subset of ethical questions like freedom vs. responsibility, materialism v. anti-materialism, authenticity vs. unreality, individuality vs. plurality, egalitarianism vs. elitism, and so forth. These are not uniquely American questions, but ones which we tend to focus on - at least from my limited experience. 
 Salinger places both of these sides in opposition, but not in the pedantic way which he rails about. Each person is not a squarish allegory for these ideas. The settings, after all, are a family drama and a coffee table conversation in New Haven. 
 Salinger here relates the American conflict of ideas clothed the intense and furious dialogue of a lover's quarrel or a dysfunctional family argument. It is not always from the Big Themes that this book is good. It's the writing style which is more engrossing as well. Most of it is conversation, with all of the fluidity and speed which that entails. 
 I can't believe I hadn't read this yet. Here's to you, Salinger, you shining sunuvvabitch. 
 I'm not afraid to compete. It's just the opposite. Don't you see that? I'm afraid I will compete -- that's what scares me. That's why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.