The Laughing Man (Salinger)

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"The Laughing Man" is a short story written by J. D. Salinger and originally published in The New Yorker magazine on March 19, 1949. It largely takes the structure of a story within a story and is thematically occupied with the relationship between narrative and narrator, and the end of youth. The story also appears in Salinger's short story collection Nine Stories.

[edit] Summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The story is told from the point of view of an unnamed narrator recounting his experience as a nine-year-old living in New York City in 1928, but largely takes the structure of a story within a story. As a member of a Boy Scout-like troop called the Comanche Club, the narrator comes into contact with a Scout leader called "The Chief", a young law student at New York University (NYU) acting as caretaker in his spare time. The Chief is described as somewhat absurd in appearance, but is widely respected by his troop for his athletic strength and storytelling ability.

Every day, after the troop has completed its activities for the afternoon, The Chief gathers the boys for the next episode in an ongoing story he tells them about the eponymous Laughing Man. Very much in the format of a serial adventure novel, The Chief's story-within-a-story describes The Laughing Man as the child of missionaries but kidnapped by bandits in China, grotesquely deformed in his face and obliged to wear a mask, but profoundly athletic and possessed of a great Robin Hood-like charm and the ability to speak with animals.

Salinger's narrator summarizes the Chief's ever more fantastical installments of The Laughing Man's escapades, presenting him as a sort of comic book hero crossing "the Chinese-Paris" border to commit acts of heroic larceny and tweaking his nose at his archenemy "Marcel Dufarge, the internationally famous detective and witty consumptive."

Eventually The Chief takes up with a young woman, Mary Hudson, who is described as both very beautiful and something of a tomboy. Unwilling to break the aura of machismo he has built up with his troop, the Chief introduces her into the boys' baseball games as a sort of associate coach.

As the Chief's relationship with his lover waxes and wanes, so too do the fortunes of The Laughing Man in the stories he tells the Comanches. One day the Chief presents an installment where The Laughing Man is taken prisoner by his archrival through a deception and betrayal, bound to a tree and in mortal danger; then he ends the episode on a cliffhanger. Immediately afterwards, the Chief brings his troop to a baseball diamond where Mary Hudson arrives. The Chief and Mary have a conversation out of earshot from the boys, both return together but distraught.

Why the couple is distraught is ambiguous, as the couple's conversation occurs away from the story's narrator. Perhaps Mary has accidentally become pregnant and the Chief is now an unexpectant father, or perhaps the couple's social situation (Mary is from an upper-class family and the Chief is not) is ultimately incompatible, and as a result, they break-up. In any case, Salinger does not explictly tell the reader.

In the final installment of his Laughing Man story, the Chief kills off the character, a symbol of the end of his own innocence and a sort of memento mori for his boys as well.

[edit] Significance

"The Laughing Man" presents several themes that were to become the centerpiece of Salinger's work, such as the relationship between narrator and story, the end of innocence, the increasing androgyny of modern society, and the idea of literature as a daily activity of life.

The Laughing Man himself suggests both a symbol of youthful machismo and an escape from the Chief's own personal ineffectuality: where the Chief is a meek law student shy around even his own lover, his character the Laughing Man is a dashing rogue with a devoted handmaiden. In addition the primary conceit that the narrator is in effect relating someone else telling him a story in his childhood illustrates the importance of such stories in life: each of the Comanche Club see in themselves some of the Laughing Man, appreciating him as hero, role model, and myth. By destroying the Laughing Man Salinger presents his characters with their own mortality: if the Laughing Man is at heart a boys' own story, then his death reminds the listeners that their boyhood will end one day, and they will need to step from the world of innocence and fantasy and face the real world before them.

In a more schematic way Mary Hudson alludes to the theme of androgyny that would fascinate Salinger in later works such as The Catcher in the Rye and Seymour: An Introduction. At once tomboyish and feminine, Mary is both a young lady of striking beauty and a player in the troop's baseball games. She enters the story as a sort of action-woman icon in the eyes of the young boys, and ends it with an essentially female act -- the inception of motherhood. Alternatively, the Mary character could be analyzed as perhaps a self-imposed deception. Life then, arrives unbidden, slyly and inconspicuously, forcing a transformation where the narrator had once only expected the stillness of a never ending summer.

[edit] References

The anime series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex prominently features a character referred to as The Laughing Man, for his masked appearance and other similarities. This Laughing Man uses a quote from another story by Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye: "I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes."