earticle

영어

John Patrick Shanley’s semi-autobiographical Prodigal Son (2016) is a single-act memory play concerning a gifted but troubled teenager, Jim Quinn, who is a student at Thomas More School, a private Catholic institution, in rural New Hampshire in 1965-1968. Essentially a Bildungsroman, the play depicts Jim’s often difficult spiritual and emotional life at the school from his arrival as a 15-year-old from the South Bronx to his graduation three years later, focusing on his relationships with his roommate, two mentors, and principal antagonist Carl Schmitt, the school’s headmaster. Several reviewers at the time of the play’s premiere opined that Prodigal Son’s protagonist has a clear antecedent in Holden Caulfield, the teenaged protagonistnarrator of J.D. Salinger’s seminal novel The Catcher in the Rye. This article examines those assertions, and argues that while there are many deliberate similarities in Shanley’s play in terms of plot, theme and character to the earlier work, Prodigal Son also departs from The Catcher in the Rye in a number of significant respects and should therefore not be regarded as overly derivative. On the contrary, this article argues that Prodigal Son is, in fact, more faithful to the conventions of the Bildungsroman than The Catcher in the Rye, while the similarities of the former to the latter can be seen as offering both a homage to the precursor text, as well as a commentary on it.