Mark Schenker, Dean at Yale College, will lecture on J. D. Salinger's famous 1951 novel in the context of various tensions evident in the book. Is it an impressive enactment of a narrator locked in perpetual adolescence?-Or is there a suggestion at the book's end that Holden has recovered from the literal and figurative falls that he suffers? Is he to be admired for his quest to keep children from losing their innocence by falling into experience, into adulthood?-Or is his belief that "certain things should stay the way they are" just an excuse for his own desire to retreat from the encounters of life? Certainly one of the achievements of the novel is the utter authenticity of Holden's narrative voice, and yet what are we to make of his tendency to go through his life as a kind of absent presence? Please register.