Cole Creates Caulfield's Shadow: Modernity and the Protagonist of 'Open City' Anonymous College

In an interview with The Millions, Teju Cole was quick to state that Salinger’s American classic The Catcher in the Rye is “one of the not-often-noticed shadows” (Morton, 2014) of his debut novel, Open City. At face value this statement simply suggests similarities between the texts but in the context of the interview Cole makes this claim in response to his interviewer’s comment that Cole’s protagonist Julius appears to him as “the intellectual 30-something version of a likable narrator in a young adult novel” (Morton, 2014). The implicit comparison of Cole’s Julius and Salinger’s Holden is however, worthy of more than a casual acknowledgement in a magazine interview. If anything, the most noticeable similarities between these texts, diverse in age and style though they are, manifest in their protagonists. Perhaps then, Cole’s shadow metaphor can be extended and made more literal: perhaps Julius is the shadow of Salinger’s angst-dogged and adolescent American protagonist, Holden Caulfield.

The most striking parallel or shadow between the two protagonists is their shared fascination with birds. Particularly, both characters focus on migratory birds, that is, birds with no set home. This “continued focus on the ducks in Central...