So, I've gotten my whole family to read Salinger's "For Esme: with Love and Squalor," so: my work here is done. Mission: accomplished. Life: complete. Dad level: shining star.
What is the point of "For Esme: with Love and Squalor"? And why is it Salinger's Magnum Opus? (No, not "Catcher in the Rye," that unfortunately generation-defining work.)
World War II changed us. Read Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Decorum Est." But it changed us in a more profound way than that. Sartre wrote "Nausea" in answer to the question: "What if there is no God, really?" And he got sick of it, the idea that there's nothing, is nothing, and when we die, will be nothing. World War II caused an Existential Crisis that not only we have not recovered from, but, looking at this generation, we continue to go down the spiral to Oblivion, screaming: "XANAX AND DOLLARS! XANAX AND DOLLARS!"
Nausea. We are sick, but we don't even know we are sick, because we're pretending that 'everything's fine' and 'I know what I'm doing' because 'there's got to be a point to all this, ... doesn't there?'
Doesn't there?
Salinger addresses this question, head on, in "For Esme: with Love and Squalor." What is the point? And he addresses it with us: the most unreliable narrator.
Take X. What does he say? ever? in this story? He does speak, but note how he does: "I told her that..." "I relayed my ..." "I felt that I should ..."
He addresses the other Platonian Shadows in this story not as himself, but as a narrator through himself.
The Narrator has crossed himself out of this story, and is using his own person as a shadow-puppet to redirect our attention away from him to ...
... to, well, anything and anybody else other than him.
He doesn't want to be seen.
Esme sees him.
Esme, bored Esme, hiding her yawn in the choir loft, sees that he sees her, and seeing her, sees her for exactly who she is. She is above all this 'normalcy' this ... SQUALOR of the Every Day, so far above it that she does these common-place things -- singing, asking: "what are you doing here?" -- at a level beyond the normal: she exists in a higher plane than everybody else, because, unlike them, these walking shadows, she does exist, she is alive, and vibrantly so. She sees our narrator, sees him seeing her, and in seeing him, gives him life, and hope, and joy, and meaning, and purpose, ...
... for one microsecond of his lifeless life.
Then he, before and after, descends right back into the Squalor of the Every Day, pretending to be normal, pretending to be 'fine,' and utterly failing to fool anybody, even and most particularly, himself.
So.
Where is the hope in this hopeless story?
"Seymour: an Introduction" tells us the answer.
"The Artist screams [crying out in Anguish] and when we run to him and ask him: 'What's wrong,' he can't say. He cannot speak it. But it is his EYES! It is his EYES that see the pain and the lost and the emptiness of this life, and cannot unsee it. And that is what kills the Artist. His EYES."
The hope, in "For Esme: with Love and Squalor," is that Esme sees the Narrator, just for that one second, and, in a totally free act of kindness, reaches her heart out to his heart, and says to him: "I see you. I see your weaknesses. I see your strengths. You are alive. I love you. I see you."
And being seen, before, during, and after, living in the squalor of the Normal he creates for himself, yes, but in that Squalor, he now has that. He was seen. He was real to someone. He brought Joy to her: happiness, delight, recognition, hope.
And that is what he will have to his dying day.
And that is something no one can take away from him.
Ever.
Not even himself.
