ABSTRACT
The opening sentence of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) sug-gests a number of ways of thinking about the figure of the author. It is at once compellingly straightforward and strangely cryptic. The sentence gives the impression of a spontaneous, candid speaking voice, directly addressing us and showing a specific concern for our wishes and desires (‘If you really want . . . you’ll probably want’). We are being addressed very much on the level – nothing pretentious here, none of ‘that David Copperfield kind of crap’. Despite appearances, however, this opening sentence gives little away, rather it is furtive and evasive: ‘I don’t feel like going into it’. The most important word in this famous opening sentence may indeed be the word ‘it’: ‘it’ is the emphatic but equivocal subject (‘If you really want to hear about it . . . I don’t feel like going into it’). Is the ‘it’ at the beginning of the sentence the same as the ‘it’ at the end?
