Salinger and Kerouac

There's no alternative "lifestyle" for Holden Caulfield or the members of the Glass family to retreat to, as there is for the Beats, no group of like-minded adventurers. Salinger's characters aren't after thrills. Their quest is for an impossible purity that drives them away from the workaday world, toward a dangerous, self-burying seclusion. "We're...freaks with freakish standards," says Zooey Glass to his sister Franny. "We're the Tattooed Lady, and we're never going to have a minute's peace, the rest of our lives, till everybody else is tattooed too."