Özet:

In spite of its distinguishable nature and obscurity, the term ‘alienation’ remains to be advanced as a primary concept outlining noticeable and remarkable features of life in modern communities. It reproduces an experience that many American authors are familiar with. Alienation is a feeling of not being able to fit or to belong anywhere. This feeling can manifest itself physically, mentally, religiously, spiritually, psychologically, politically, socially or economically. At one point or another in time, each one of us has experienced alienation in one way or another whether at school, at work, at home among members of family, in politics, and in society. Thus, alienation is the state of being withdrawn or isolated from one’s surrounding, events and activities through indifference or disaffection. The paper aims to explore and analyze the extent to which three Americans living in New York, J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Saul Bellow’s Tommy Wilhelm, fail to adjust themselves in their environments, feel alienated from fellow New Yorkers, from social institutions and members of their respective families, learn to accept their plights and come out of alienation in the end.

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