Practice Diction Analysis

In this excerpt from J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the narrator’s conversational, slightly harsh diction emphasizes the youthful, rambling, aloof style with which he speaks and thinks. The narrator rejects talking about his childhood, labeling it as “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.” He furthermore isn’t going to “tell you [his] whole goddam autobiography or anything.” Rather, the narrator centers his attentions on his brother, a rich writer whom he admires, in addition to “this madman stuff that happened to [him] around last Christmas.” From the narrator’s colloquialisms and lack of consideration for conventionality when first telling someone about himself, one can derive that the narrator is a brash youth given to roughness of speech.