J D Salinger artistic equivalent ...

I always associate J D Salinger to Edward Hopper. His paintings always invite to us to make them our own,  we can create our own stories behind them. Likewise , Salinger, lets the reader analyze the characters with him, with no definite answer on who they are after finishing his stories, which in a sense reflects how we all try to understand people around us in the real world. Ambiguity and melancholy characterise both artist's work. Just before the war with the eskimos is my favourite of  his work, short story or novel, its the most ambiguous and intriguing, you can interpret whichever way you like. These are some of my favourite Hopper paintings:
      
Windows are an important metaphor in any artwork: illusion, dream etc. like in the Looking out  , the painting in the center. But the way that Hopper paints windows is similar to how Salinger writes stories. Its as though we are looking through a peep hole into their life. Illusion is a recurring theme in both of their work,like in the painting on the left New York Movies, there is a coalition between her thoughts, her worries, the world inside her head and that of the movie , two different worlds of imagination.

The ambiguity, the melancholy, the voyeurisme, our futile desire to analyze and  understand people  around us , is what makes both artist's work so captivating and similar.  

This is beautiful poem by Baudelaire:

Windows

Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.

Across the ocean of roofs, I can see a middle-aged woman, her face already lined, who is forever bending over something and who never goes out. Out of her face, her dress, and her gestures, out of practically nothing at all, I have made up this woman’s story, or rather legend, and sometimes I tell it to myself and weep.

If it had been an old man I could have made up his just as well.

And I go to bed proud to have lived and to have suffered in some one besides myself.

Perhaps you will say “Are you sure that your story is the real one?” But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?

- Charles Baudelaire