Comparison of The Catcher in the Rye and Fahrenheit 451

            The three novels I have read are: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.  I am now reading The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck.  In an earlier blog, I compared and contrasted The Old Man and the Sea and The Catcher in the Rye.  I am going to compare and contrast The Catcher in the Rye and Fahrenheit 451.  To help me with figuring out the similarities and differences, I drew a Venn diagram.  I used a Venn diagram for my last comparison between the two novels.  Up first are the differences! 

            For starters, each novel is written by a different author.  The Catcher in the Rye was written by J.D. Salinger, while Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451.  Getting into the actual text, as readers we are able to see the characters, writing styles, and plots.  In Fahrenheit 451 the main character is a middle-aged man who was a firefighter who burned books.  As for The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield is a teenager who has gotten kicked out of four different boarding schools.  The two authors have diverse writing styles.  Not just through the words they put down on paper but also the way they divide the novel.  Ray Bradbury divided his novel into three separate sections that each had a symbolic title.  J.D. Salinger went with the normal thing to do, which is to start new ideas with chapters every so often.  There are twenty-six chapters in The Catcher in the Rye. 

            When you have differences, you must have similarities.  In both novels, the readers are able to see vast amount of descriptions being used.  “Behind him he heard the  lawn sprinkling system jump up, filling the dark air with rain that fell gently and then with a steady pour all about, washing on the sidewalks and draining into the alley. He carried a few drops of this rain with him on his face” (Bradbury 136).  “They always looked mossy and awful, and he damn near made you sick if you saw him in the dining room with his mouth full of mashed potatoes and peas or something. Besides that, he had a lot of pimples. Not just on his forehead or his chin, like most guys, but all over his whole face” (Salinger 19). 

Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Del Rey Book, 1991. Print.

Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. Print.