Skaz

The story "skaz", written by David Lodge, is referring to the writing style “skaz”. The origin and meaning of the word skaz, comes from the Russian language. Suggesting "jazz" and "scat", as in "scat-singing", to the English ear is what it is described as in the story. This text analyzes “The Cather in the Rye”, it is written in first-person narration, in which the character is “I”, which makes the reader feel part of the story. The type of vocabulary and syntax are also described in this story; colloquial speech is used, which should make something seem as if it is more real. Although no one would really speak like that in real life, the reader always interprets it as real. Ernst Hemingway said: “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn”. Holden Caulfield is a perfect example of this, with a small difference that he is more educated and sophisticated, and the son of a wealthy New Yorker. Besides that, the characters are very similar, both are youthful escapers from a world of adult hypocrisy, venality, and love to use their own favorite word, phoniness.
After a lot of analyzing of both books, Lodge starts to discuss Holden’s narrative style. His style makes it sound like speech rather than writing. It seems as if it was teenage speech because a lot of repetition and slang is used. Words such as “jerk”, “bored as hell”, “phoney”, “big deal”, “killed me” and “old” are used on a very regular, repetitive bases. He exaggerates a lot, with a device called hyperbole, a very good example of this: “You’d have thought they haven’t seen each other in twenty years”. In addition, the syntax used is very simple, and basic. He also uses short sentences, which make it seem as if his writing isn’t very developed. Not to forget, his speech includes a lot of grammatical errors.
Although it is very easy to analyze the mistakes that Salinger makes in his writing, on purpose, it isn’t easy to understand why the reader is so interested in reading this. It isn’t perfectly developed nor is it a great example of grammatical performance or anything like this. The reader is just addicted to this kind of writing. As jazz musicians would say, it swings, and that’s why we are interested in it.