“Love” is a word that pervades criticism of J.D. Salinger’s writing. Scholars have written at length about the overwhelming “love” of innocence that seems to power much of Salinger’s writing, or of Salinger’s protective, sheltering “love” of children—both qualities exemplified in his most popular characters, Seymour Glass and Holden Caulfield. Along with this, much has been made of the “universal love,” a sort of deep compassion for all mankind, that Salinger seems to espouse in his later works which compose his “Glass Family Saga,” Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters, Seymour: An Introduction, and his last published work, “Hapworth 16 1924.”
    However, one type of love that is mostly ignored in the ongoing critical discussion of Salinger’s work is the concept of romantic love. Perhaps this is a conscious attempt on the part of critics (and readers) to keep Salinger’s short fiction somehow “pure” by divorcing it as much as possible from such “sordid” concerns as romantic love. Well, if it seems at first that Salinger’s fiction is a retreat from the concerns of the heart, or a safe haven in which one can hide from the ubiquitous debate regarding men, women and their interactions, it is a notion that is quickly dashed by an examination of the man’s work itself.
    Nowhere else in Salinger’s body of work do romantic love and the troubles of the heart make more of an impact than they do in his collection of short stories, Nine Stories. At first glance, these stories seem to deal with many of the themes that run throughout Salinger’s other works—themes such as innocence and the natural wisdom of children—and little else. However, upon closer examination of these stories, one can see Nine Stories as a turning point in Salinger’s career, a moment of rare honesty during which Salinger grew as a writer, exploring new, more directly personal topics, and branching off into some very emotional, sometimes very painful, areas of the human experience.
    These “new” themes of the relationships between men and women that Salinger tackles in Nine Stories were merely hinted at by the chaste Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger’s work that immediately preceded Nine Stories. After Nine Stories, these same issues would once again recede into the background of Salinger’s fiction, as the members of his Glass family (the characters he writes about exclusively in his later fiction) wrote off most romantic relationships as frivolous or incomprehensible.
    Although Salinger seems to pick up this weighty subject matter only to set it down again when the last story of the cycle is finished, it does not mean that these stories, or the issues they discuss, are disposable in any way. Indeed, because they discuss so bravely issues that the rest of Salinger’s fiction seems to avoid, they become indispensable in discussing this author’s craft. Salinger’s work simply cannot be fully understood if his attitude towards romantic love as expressed through Nine Stories, is not explored. The lack of appropriate academic attention notwithstanding, romantic love, and the attitudes and actions of people in romantic relationships, is an issue that Salinger returns to again and again in his cycle of inter-related short stories, Nine Stories. Romantic relationships, encounters, longings and tragic near misses, appear in almost every story of the cycle. The only story that does not feature a romantic relationship as an integral part of the tale is the exclusively mother/son story “Down at the Dingy,” although for brevity’s sake I will only discuss three of Salinger’s stories in detail in this paper. Some of these romantic relationships are described only very briefly—painted in silhouette, so to speak—but each appearance they make is vitality important to understanding not only the meaning of the story in which they appear, but the meaning of Nine Stories as a whole. Through the course of these stories, Salinger presents us with several portraits of people at the mercy of love: people in love, people seeking love and people losing love. In every case, the force of love has a terribly negative effect on those that come close to it.
    But who is to blame for this failure of love to satisfy us and make us happy? Salinger seems to leave his characters, lovers involved in the relationships, with clean hands and instead finds fault with the complex emotion of love itself, and, more often than not, a cold, hostile world that does permit people to express powerful emotions freely. Salinger describes his lovers—every one of which is wounded in some way—with the utmost sympathy, and, particularly in his later, more abstract fiction, with little bit of cosmically detached pity. In Salinger’s fiction, people who are the innocent victims of love’s almighty influence, and, particularly in Nine Stories, it is the process of loving itself, the powerful, irrational attraction, the desire for physical intimacy, and the need to be an indispensable part of another person’s life that so often corrupts people or leads them to ruin.
    Salinger separates the flaws of love into two broad categories: love’s vulnerability and impermanence, and love’s tendency to inhibit lovers from truly growing or expressing themselves. In our modern psychological vernacular, we would label such love as “self destructive” and describe the situations that arise from them as “bad relationships.” Salinger makes no such distinction between “bad love” and “good love” in his fiction; all romantic love shares these critical flaws, and, in the world of Nine Stories, all lovers and would-be-lovers suffer for it.
    Given that love is such a powerful influence in the world of Nine Stories, it makes sense that the fickleness of romantic feelings would greatly impact the characters of these stories. In several of his stories, most notably in the enigmatic “Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut,” and “The Laughing Man,” Salinger give us very clear, and clearly negative, images of love as an emotion that, for all of its power and influence, is not stable, reliable, or permanent in any real way. Furthermore, romantic love, when it dies, never dies quietly, and it always takes some of the abandoned lover’s innocence, the childlike innocence which is so vitally precious to Salinger, with it when it goes.
    “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” is perhaps Salinger’s best known short story, both for its slick, masterful storytelling and its sudden, violent ending. It is also the story that introduces us to one of Salinger’s most popular characters, the extremely troubled, but profoundly spiritually aware modern holy man Seymour Glass. Not only does “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” open the collection of Nine Stories, but this brisk story also contains Salinger’s harshest indictments of romantic love in its portrayal of the violent, senseless end of a strong marriage.
     “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” begins innocently enough, with Muriel—now Mrs. Seymour Glass—talking on the phone to her mother. This one conversation, which accounts for almost half of the story’s length, consists of Muriel lazily painting her fingernails while reassuring her worried mother that her vacation with Seymour to the beach is going well. The mother, who hasn’t spoken to Muriel for several days, opens her end of the conversation by telling Muriel that, “I have been worried to death about you.” (Salinger, 4) and asking her again and again if she is “all right.” (4) At first all of this seems innocent enough, as if Muriel’s mother is simple a dotting parent, until a history of Seymour’s strange, irrational and sometimes dangerous behavior begins to emerge in their conversation. An incident with Seymour somehow wrecking Muriel’s father’s car is mentioned, and Muriel’s mother makes an oblique reference to Seymour’s driving and some “funny business with the trees.” (5) She also makes reference to Seymour’s stay in an Army psychiatric hospital only a few months prior. Muriel defends her husband valiantly throughout her mother’s attacks. At her mother’s insistence that she fly home immediately and that Seymour see a psychiatrist as soon as possible, Muriel denies that anything is wrong with Seymour at all. She attempts to placate her mother by reassuring her that, other than a bad case of sunburn, she (Muriel) “really is okay.” The arguments end with Muriel proclaiming boldly that she is “not afraid of Seymour.” (10)
    Muriel’s devotion to her troubled husband is apparent throughout this conversation, and so the strength of their marriage is revealed. Through her side of the conversation, Muriel also makes the reader understand that the love between her and Seymour is not just one way. She mentions several loving deeds Seymour has preformed during their marriage; he brought a book of German poetry back to her from the war (World War II), and gives her a series of affectionate, is not unusual, nicknames, the latest of which is “Miss Spiritual Tramp of 1948” (5). All in all the Glass’ marriage seems strong and loving until, after spending a short, cryptic day on the beach, a day which culminates in an argument with a total stranger in the hotel elevator, Seymour returns to the couple’s hotel room and, without leaving a note or any other explanation, calmly shoots himself in the head as his wife sleeps on the bed bedside him.
    More than anything, Seymour’s suicide is an act of betrayal to his loving, devoted wife. During the story, the troubled Seymour makes no attempt to tell his wife about whatever mental, emotional or spiritual issues are disturbing him so severely. He never warns her that he is feeling self-destructive, that he feels violent towards himself or that he is thinking of ending his own life. In a sense, he is being dishonest with her, lying through omission, and this dishonesty eventually leads to the tragic death of a sensitive young man and the widowing of a warm, devoted wife. In one instant, Seymour has stolen the love that Muriel had so much hope for and had put so much of herself into, and, with one single bullet, Salinger has killed the strongest romantic relationship that we will find within the pages of Nine Stories.
    The second story in the collection, “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut,” deals with the same issue of love’s vulnerability. By the start of this story, one of the lovers, Walter Glass (who is, strangely enough, Seymour’s brother) is already long dead, killed in a freak, non-combat related, accident during his tour of duty in World War II. “Uncle Wiggly” follows a reunion between Eloise, Walter’s former lover, who has since married a man she whom she doesn’t love, and her college roommate, Mary Jane.
    Eloise is truly a tragic case in Salinger’s fiction. Her heartbreak at her lost love is so complete that it seeps into every aspect of her character, even simple interactions with old, dear friends. It doesn’t take long for the old friends to bring up Eloise’s current marriage. Mary Jane innocently asks, “How’re you getting along these days, anyway?” to which the drunken Eloise sharply replies, “Don’t be funny,” as if her hurt and pain should be readily apparent. (21)
    And under certain circumstance, this pain is apparent, expressing itself as bitterness, regret and a total lack of compassion for others’ suffering. Eloise, who was once a kind, open young lady she was with Walter, has since become an unhappy and angry wife and mother. She laughs at the idea of her mother-in-law one day dying, saying that “she’ll probably leave me a monogrammed icepick or something.” (21) In another exchange with Mary Jane, Eloise’s bitterness seems incorrigible:
 

“Dr. Whiting’s dead…. Whiting got cancer two summers ago and died and all. She only weighed sixty-two pounds when she died. Isn’t that terrible?”
“No”
“Eloise, you’re getting hard as nails. (23)

    Eventually, Eloise begins talking about the differences between Walter (her dead lover) and her husband Lew. Like his brother Seymour, Walter was an unusually sensitive, bright, loving man, but unlike Seymour he carried no painful emotional baggage, and by all accounts his relationship with Eloise was idyllic. It is only when she is remembering Walter that Eloise’s hard shell cracks. She makes such wistful claims as, “He was the only boy that could make me laugh. I mean really laugh.” (28) However, she returns to her dismissive bitterness and self-pity when speaking of Lew. Mary Jane asks her:
 

“Doesn’t Lew have a sense of humor?”
“Oh, God! Who knows? Yes I guess so….”
“Well,” Mary Jane said, “That isn’t everything….you know, laughing and stuff.”
“Who says it isn’t?” (29)

This exchange shows exactly what Eloise lost when she lost her first love, the ability to laugh, to enjoy life, to feel something for another human being. And the way that love was taken from her—Walter was killed while stationed overseas when a gas stove he received as a gift exploded in his face and killed him—elevates the situation from merely sad to tragic.
    “The Laughing Man,” takes a slightly different perspective on the precariousness of love, in that the affair in question isn’t a marriage but a young love, and no one dies to end it. Still, the ramifications are just as severe. In “The Laughing Man,” a young man named John Gedsudski, called “The Chief” by the members of the little league baseball team he manages, The Comanches, begins a relationship with a pretty young girl named Mary Hudson. The Chief, a physically plain but enormously warmhearted man, is all around nice guy. The children he coaches, all of whom look up to the man as a sort of big brother/father figure, adore him. As the narrator of the story—a now adult member of the Comanche team who tells this story by looking back on his childhood—informs us, “If wishes were inches, all of us Comanches would have had [the Chief] a giant in no time. (57)
    The Chief also happens an engaging storyteller, whose tales of the “The Laughing Man,” a masked highwayman who lives a life of adventure and danger, enthralls his young ballplayers between games. However, it becomes apparent early on that there is more to the Chief’s stories than mere daring-do. Through a series of intricate parallels between events in the Chief’s life and events in his fantastic Laughing Man stories, it becomes clear that the Laughing Man is an idealized version of the Chief himself, and, although it entertains the children, the Laughing Man stories are the Chief’s way of examining his own life and dilemmas. For example, through his description of the deformed Laughing Man, the Chief hints at poignant concerns he has about his own physical appearance; in particular, “his large fleshy nose” seems to mirror the Laughing Man’s own nose which “consisted of two flesh sealed nostrils.” (59)
    Before the appearance of Mary Hudson in the Chief’s life, the Laughing Man is terribly lonely. He is a man so disfigured, whose face is so hideous, that the only companions he keeps are forest animals who did not react to his physical appearance, and three human confederates who are never allowed to see his face. But with this loneliness comes absolute freedom, as the Laughing Man runs ramshackle along the “Paris-Chinese border,” robbing thieves of their loot, having wild adventures and becoming beloved in the hearts of his fellow countrymen.
    However, immediately after the Chief begins a relationship with Mary Hudson, and she begins to exert an unconscious influence over him (an influence usually reserved to causing him to dress up and comb his hair a bit neater than he would have otherwise), the Laughing Man becomes trapped for the first time in his career. This is no mere coincidence, as in the real world, the Chief’s absolute freedom has been taken from him by Mary Hudson, albeit in a much more enjoyable, cordial way.
    This beginning of the romantic relationship between Mary Hudson and the Chief also signals the start of a long arc of The Laughing Man story that explains how the Laughing Man came to be trapped by his archenemies, a father/daughter team of wicked police officers known as the Dufarges. The cliffhanger ending of this arc, which leaves the Laughing Man tied to a tree at the mercy of the Dufarges, leaves the Comanches almost sick with anticipation. However, the Chief puts the conclusion of this chapter of the story off for the entire time that he is involved with Mary Hudson, constantly asserting that he has no time to finish the story, despite the Comanche’s protests.
    After a period of time of happy courtship, the relationship between Mary and the Chief comes to a sudden, explosive end, with a screaming match in the middle of a baseball diamond. After this argument, as the story ends, something inside the Chief has changed, has gone sour. He yells at the Comanches, which he has never done before, and he seems frantic and bitter. His final installment of the story puts the Laughing Man through a similarly negative change: death.
    The reason behind the Chief and Mary Hudson’s breakup is never explained, but Salinger gives us several clues as to the cause in the next installment of the Chief’s Laughing Man. In this installment, the Laughing Man dies a painful, horrible death at the hands of the Dufarges. The senior Dufarge (the father) shoots the Laughing Man four times in the stomach, and, thinking the hero dead, Mlle. Dufarge (the daughter) removes the Laughing Man’s mask. Here the Laughing Man, who had not actually died, accomplishes an amazing comeback. By “contracting his stomach muscles in a secret manner” the Laughing Man
 

…suddenly raised his face, gave a terrible laugh and neatly, even fastidiously, regurgitated all four bullets. The impact of this feat on the Dufarges was so acute that their hearts literally burst, and they dropped dead at the Laughing Man’s feet. (72)

    This might, at first, seem like a positive event for the Laughing Man, were it not that Mlle. Dufarge is the Chief’s fictional alter ego for Mary Hudson, his former love. It’s not terribly difficult to see Mary in Mlle. Dufarge, both are women that have finally trapped unattached, adolescent men. Both are the only women who have seen the man’s in question’s “true face,” (metaphorically for Mary Hudson and literally for Mlle. Dufarge) and eventually each brings about that man’s downfall.
But if Mary Hudson is Mlle. Dufarge, whom does the fictional character’s father, the elder Dufarge, represent? If the allegory of the Laughing Man story holds up, then we can reliably say that Mr. Dufarge would logically be Mary’s father, who is never seen, or even directly mentioned in the story. Although this might at first seem like a bit of stretch, this twist on the story says a lot about Salinger’s feelings about the vulnerability of love.
    By portraying Mary’s father as the hidden culprit behind the death of The Chief and Miss Hudson’s relationship (remember it is Mr. Dufarges, the father of Mlle. Dufarges, who fires the fatal bullets into the Chief’s alter-ego, The Laughing Man) Salinger further emphasizes romantic love utter vulnerability. In Salinger’s story—and some would say in life itself—love is terribly susceptible to attack by both external and internal forces. It crumbles under the pressure of uncaring fathers (“The Laughing Man”), wars in faraway countries (“Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut”) or even the weight of personal action (“A Perfect Day for Bananafish”).
    This triangle of influences reaches into almost every aspect of human life. The father in “The Laughing Man,” symbolizes the influence of families, friends, and, in a more general way, society and public opinion. The war in “Uncle Wiggly” (and in several other stories in the book) symbolizes uncontrollable external occurrences. Finally, Seymour’s motivation for his suicide (an issue that has been hotly debated since the story’s publication), which has such brutal consequences in the first story of the cycle, represents the powerful influence of personal neuroses, anxieties and other internal factors can have on romantic love. By having love fail in so many varied, and seemingly avoidable, ways, Salinger gives the reader an unflinchingly negative image of romantic love as a feeling that is illusory, constantly vulnerable and entirely capricious, no matter how solid or real it might seem.
The truly tragic aspect love’s impermanence is that it is not only flawed love that expires early in Salinger’s fiction. Instead good love, strong love dies, or is taken away from the lovers just as easily. The relationship between The Chief and Mary Hudson, like the relationships between the couples in the other two stories mentioned above, is a strong love, in many ways an innocent love, but it is a love that ends prematurely and painfully nonetheless.
    The effect of this premature end to love is devastating to the lover that is left behind. We never see Muriel’s reaction Seymour suicide in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” but Salinger’s violent, terse language at the end of the story gives us some hint at how damaged she will be at the loss of her husband.
 

He glanced at the girl lying asleep on one of the twin beds. Then he went over to one of the pieces of luggage, opened it, and from under a pile of shorts and undershirts he took out an Ortgies calibre 7.65 automatic…. Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple. (18)

This short, almost clinical description of Seymour’s suicide not only shows his detachment from the world around him (he merely “glanced” at his wife when he entered their room), but shows how much his death will effect her. By having them occupy separate “twin beds,” Salinger cleverly shows both the unspoken distance between them (a distance that Seymour feels more severely than his sleeping wife does) and how intertwined their lives are. The blast from Seymour’s suicide shot will most surely wake Muriel up, not only physically, but wake her up mentally and emotionally to whatever very serious problem her beloved husband had. From the examples of other abandoned lovers we have in Nine Stories, we can assume it will be a very rude awakening.
    In both “The Laughing Man” and “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut,” this grief is expressed through misdirected anger towards children, innocent eyewitnesses to the end of the romantic relationships. At the conclusion of “The Laughing Man,” the Chief’s final installment of his popular Laughing Man story is so full of bitterness at the end of his relationship with Mrs. Hudson that it shocks the normally rowdy Comanches into silence. In this final installment, the Chief describes the Laughing Man’s horrible end as he dies slowly and in terrible pain, bleeding to death from the wounds inflicted by Mr. Dufarge’s bullets.
 

A peculiar and heart-rending gasp of final sorrow came from the Laughing Man. He reached out wanly for the vial of eagle’s blood (Author’s note: eagle’s blood is the Laughing Man’s only source of food) and crushed it in his hand. What little blood he had left trickled thinly down his wrist…. The Laughing Man’s last act, before turning his face to the bloodstained ground, was to pull off his mask. (73)

This graphic depiction of the Laughing Man’s death is the key image of this story in many respects. Not only does this show how severely the loss of love has hurt the Chief, it shows how the hurt of loss loves tends to spread out to others in insidious ways. The Chief would never have told such a disturbing story to his team of nine-year-olds under normal circumstances, but in doing so he has left an impression on those innocent children forever. The narrator of the story, who some critics have identified as regular Salinger mouthpiece Buddy Glass (another of Seymour’s fictional brothers), is not only stunned by the brutal death of his fiction childhood hero, but the horrible change he sees overcome his real life hero, the Chief.
 

The Chief started up the bus. Across the aisle from me, Billy Walsh, who was the youngest of all the Comanches,  burst into tears. None of us told him to shut up. As for me, I remember my knees were shaking.
       A few minutes later, when I stepped off of the Chief’s bus, the first thing I chanced to see was a piece of red tissue paper flapping in the wind against the base of a lamppost. It looked like someone’s poppy-petal mask, I arrived home with my teeth chattering uncontrollably and was told to go to right straight to bed. (73)

    In “Uncle Wiggly,” Eloise, whose suffers a loss both more brutal and permanent than the Chief’s, when her true love, Walker, dies senselessly near the end of the war. Out of this loss, Eloise shoulders a proportionally sustained and brutal anger that she directs against those who love her. Her relationship with her young daughter Ramona—another of Salinger’s symbols of innocence—is of particular interest to the story, and Eloise’ treatment of the child is so cruel that it borders on child abuse. She refuses to allow her daughter to have her new imaginary friend, Mickey Mickereenoo, to play with her invisible companion in peace.
    This imaginary friend is a masterful creation on Salinger’s part, encapsulating in one succinct image all of the sadness and alienation that accompanies an abrupt end to a romantic relationship. The imaginary friend is a symbol of innocence, or purity, of hope, all childlike qualities that Eloise has lost due to the tragic events of her life. To see these characteristics reflected in her own daughter is too painful, so she lashes out against her child. In order to squelch the innocence that pains her so, Eloise forces Ramona, who has been sleeping on only one side of her mattress to make room for Mickey Mickerenoo, to abandon her imaginary friend completely, to “move to the center of the bed.” Also, there is a certain convienence in having a purely imaginary relationship with a loved one; when Ramona’s first imaginary boyfriend Jimmy Jimereenno “dies” after being “hit by a truck,” she simply replaces him with another one, in this case Mickey Mickereenoo. This is the one thing that Eloise has never been able to do, replace Walter. She has replaced him physically, in the role of lover, but she can never replace him mentally or emotionally, which is exactly what her young daughter has done so easily. The imaginary friend is a companion that might not be there in a physical sense, but is very present, very real emotionally and mentally. This is a source of hope, and is, in many ways, the perfect companion, in that it is a companion that can never leave you. But to Eloise, her daughter’s perfect security and love for a boy that is not there is a hideous parody of her own loss of her very real husband.
    The implied danger of love’s fickleness stems from the necessity of lovers (or would-be-lovers) in romantic relationships to rely on others for their happiness. When love strikes, one’s happiness is no longer one’s own. Viewed from this perspective, it seems that the volatility of love isn’t really in the emotions at all, but in the lovers themselves and the nature of their relationships. But when one backs up and looks at the larger picture that Salinger provides in his stories, the reasons behind the fickleness of his characters, we do not see dishonesty or conscious deceit their, but see only honest expression of emotions. Although there is a measure of personal choice in their actions, neither Seymour Glass, Mary Hudson, nor Walker Glass (Eloise’s husband and, strangely enough, another of Seymour’s brother) wanted to hurt their lovers, they were simply reacting to (or being manipulated by) the circumstances of their own lives in the best way they knew how.
By making this fickleness “honest,” or at very least understandable, Salinger further darkens his picture of love by showing how it is possible, even probable, for lovers with their separate identities, desires, goals and needs, to hurt each other unintentionally.
    This lead directly into Salinger’s second criticism with love, in that love very often inhibits personal growth and honest communication between those in romantic relationships. Whereas most view love as a coming together and sharing of emotions, Salinger’s fiction emphasizes everything people hide from those they love, either to avoid hurting their loved one or avoid being hurt themselves. To make matters worse, instead of opening up with time, Salinger’s lovers often become even more sheltered and defensive as their emotional investment in the relationship becomes greater and their fear of losing their loved ones becomes more and more crippling. This pattern of behavior leads to problems with self-expression, honesty, trust and even self-perception as the secretive lover becomes more and more unsure about what can be shared with others and what to keep hidden. To see this one only has to look at “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and see not what Seymour does, but what he never does. Although he and Muriel have been married for some time and have gone through many trials together, he cannot bring himself to confide in his wife, sharing with her whatever demons haunt. Similarly, in “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut,” Lew knows almost nothing about his wife or who she truly is. He isn’t even aware that a person such as Walter existed before they married. The simple fact that we never witness a serious conversation between the Chief and Mary Hudson in “The Laughing Man,” implies that communications between them are strained at best.
    These stories are certainly not the only instances that Salinger brings romantic love to the forefront of his work in Nine Stories. In this collection, the same characters, places, events and themes run through all of the stories, giving us a grouping of tales that is not so much multi-textured as it is intricately woven and richly hued. Perhaps these stories are not even the best, or at least the most obvious, examples of love in Salinger’s short fiction, but they are the richest, and each story serves as a touchstone, a connection, to the other stories in the cycle and the issues that they deal with.
    With his vivid, and sometimes unsettling, depictions of love, Salinger shows us a world we each have seen, but would like to ignore. We have each suffered from love’s fickleness and we have each kept secrets from those we love. Although Salinger’s fiction is decidedly non-didactic, these three stories do carry a definite message, and through the examples of his characters in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Uncle Wiggly in Conneticut,” and “The Laughing Man,” we can see some patterns of behavior in others or ourselves. By noticing these patterns, perhaps those of us who have lost love or kept secrets from our loved ones can avoid the next step in the painful process, the corruption, the emotional stagnation and the lashing out at those we love. Perhaps by reading Salinger’s very poignant and very human stories about love, we can save ourselves some of the pain that love so often causes.

Work Cited

Salinger, Jerome David. Nine Stories. Boston. Little Brown and Company. 1953.