Replaying Adolescence: Temporality and Recurrence in <i>Life is Strange</i> and <i>The Catcher in the Rye</i>

Abstract This article examines how J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Dontnod Entertainment’s Life is Strange (2015) represent adolescence as a struggle with time – its repetitions, trepidations, and limits. Both works figure youth as recursive rather than linear, where efforts to preserve or repair what is lost generate further entanglement. Through close reading and formal analysis, the essay argues that Catcher renders adolescence as narrative recursion – Holden Caulfield’s circling voice and guarded address – while Life is Strange translates that structure into a playable system of rewinds, revisions, and consequences. In each, interiority is bound to care: attempts to protect others expose the costs of intervention. Tracing how repetition shifts from symptom to structure, the article shows how postwar preoccupations with memory and mastery re-emerge in digital storytelling, making adolescence a site of temporal pressure whose rehearsals of agency cannot secure stability.