[10] Due to the gravity of Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and the immediate entry of the United States into World War II, Salinger’s story of “dissatisfied upper-class youths” was deemed contrary to the country’s wartime mood.
[11] In the summer of 1943, The New Yorker indicated that “Slight Rebellion” would appear in its Christmas edition, but insisted that the story be shortened due to space considerations, to which Salinger consented.
[12] This experience contributed to Salinger’s sense of betrayal, and served to deepen his “suspicion of editorial methods and motives for the rest of his career.”[13] “Slight Rebellion off Madison” would not appear in the journal until after the end of the war, on December 21, 1946.
[14][15] Biographer Kenneth Slawenki notes that Holden’s denunciations of social conventions take the form of “a scotch-drenched litany” whose “vehemence and self-derision” exceeds the expressions of disaffection that appear in The Catcher in the Rye (1951).
[22] Indeed, “Salinger aligns himself so closely to Holden Caulfield as to cast his own spirit within the main character.”[23] Kenneth Slawenski writes: Though Salinger may have devoted his writing to exposing and parodying the emptiness of upper-class Manhattan society, it was the only world he knew…While Holden Caulfield decries the falseness of trendy society, his creator was sitting in the Stork Club, entertaining a life of pretension and craving the very things he reviled in print.
[25] Literary critic John Wenke writes: His solution is to fashion an escape-to-nature fantasy that, ironically, would culminate in marriage to Sally…She wrestles Holden’s absurd plan into a pragmatic and level-headed deferral…she replaces his escape wish with a guided tour.