"all that David Copperfield kind of crap"

Salinger's Catcher In The Rye states in it's opening passage that he isn't going to relay his "humble beginnings" like that of David Copperfield. In other words, Salinger is displaying the contrast in writing styles, tone, diction, characterization, etc. that Dickens has to his own. Salinger is trying to explain that he is not going to beat around the bush and drop flowers and rainbows over his life. Dickens novels in comparison, does the opposite. Dickens fills his stories with in depth descriptions of everything from plot to the characters. Dickens style is lengthy and vivid. His words paint a picture in your mind that are everlasting. He's very successful at achieving a connection between the reader and his characters. He makes the audience feel as though we know the characters personally because he describes them with the up most detail. He's very precise in his diction and syntax. Dicken's complex imagery and characterization has become his style in almost all of his work. Now referring back to Salinger's Catcher In The Rye, Salinger purposefully compares his character to Dicken's character in order to achieve a solid contradiction between the two. This comparison achieves the authors intentions of showing that Salinger's character is more conservative, lacking emotion, pessimistic about the world, and confrontational with the negatives he sees in his life. Creating this distance between the protagonist from Dicken's ultimately sets the stage for Salinger's character. He flawlessly achieves to characterize his character by simply stating he is the opposite of Dicken's David Copperfield. Salinger successfully gives a huge amount of detail about his own character through the use of comparison with Dicken's, and he does all this in merely a few sentences.