The Bildungsroman is what Stella Bolaki briefly defines as “the novel of individual development” (9). Moreover, she remarks that “The Bildungsroman,” she remarks, has a certain baggage attached to it. In its schematic representation, its primary function is to make integration into the existing social order legitimate by channeling individual energy into socially useful purposes” (12). Hence, the Bildungsroman presents an individual who is eventually assimilated into the given society and turns into a useful social contributor. In my paper I would like to concentrate on three novels that offer the distorted Bildungsroman model: J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Marguerite Duras’ The Lover (1984) and The North China Lover (1991). I argue that the above-mentioned works belong to the new Bildungsroman genre which, by presenting the growing up of the protagonists in a subverted way, proposes an alternative vision of the characters’ initiation into the adulthood. While unsettling the Bildungsroman traditional model, Salinger’s and Duras’ works challenge the socio-cultural framework and engage into an intertextual dialogue with the novelistic Bildungsroman convention. By doing so, they simultaneously prove that the theme of “growing up in literature,” though approached from a new perspective, has not lost its appeal and deserves attention.

Keywords: J. D. Salinger, M. Duras, Bildungsroman, Growing up, Literature.