...4141- 4141--- Cherished and Cursed:Towarda Social History of The Catcher in the Rye STEPHEN J. WHITFIELD THE plot is brief:in 1949 or perhaps 1950, over the course of three days during the Christmas season, a sixteen-yearold takes a picaresque journey to his New YorkCity home from the third private school to expel him. The narratorrecounts his experiences and opinions from a sanitarium in California. A heavy smoker, Holden Caulfield claims to be already six feet, two inches tall and to have wisps of grey hair; and he wonders what happens to the ducks when the ponds freeze in winter. The novel was published on 16 July 1951, sold for $3.00, and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Within two weeks, it had been reprinted five times, the next month three more times-though by the third edition the jacket photographof the author had quietly disappeared. His book stayed on the bestseller list for thirty weeks, though never above fourth place.' Costing 75?, the Bantam paperback edition appeared in 1964. By 1981, when the same edition went for $2.50, sales still held steady, between twenty and thirty thousand copies per month, about a quarter of a million copies annually. In paperback the novel sold over three million copies between 1953 and 1964, climbed even higher by the 1980s, and continues to attract about as many buyers as it did in 1951. The durabilityof The author appreciates the invitationof Professors Marc Lee Raphaeland Robert A. Gross to present an early version...
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...The Catcher in the Rye I would want to be able to read any book that could teach me something important even if it can come off as inappropriate, wouldn’t you? The catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger should not be banned because it could teach many lessons teens can learn from and it is relatable to teens’ lives. One reason why it shouldn’t be banned it because it shows moral lessons that teens could really benefit from. The book also contains lessons on religion, intolerance, and respect. Holden is very hateful and disrespectful. He considers himself as an atheist because he cannot handle religion. People also say that the sexual content in this book is too much but Holden never goes into detail and he is a virgin so that reason is invalid. He has a personality that isn’t okay in the society and he knows it’s not okay and he doesn’t like it either....
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...“The Catcher in the Rye” is written by J.D Salinger which focuses on the reality of life through the eyes of a teenager who sees the world as a painful existence. The novel is written from the perspective of Holden who has been expelled from his fourth school. After a fight with his roommate, Holden leaves early to explore New York City alone. Holden battles with the reality of adulthood that has turn a different turn on his life. We get to this stage where we fear to grow up and see what will be coming for us next in the future. Salinger’s novel clearly displays the experience of being isolated from multiple activities which can lead to the theme of alienation, the creation of the character (Holden) and also the symbolism which can be unnoticed. Salinger tries to convey a message with his writing to also displaying human connection is a must. The theme of “The Catcher in the Rye” is alienation which connects to Holden (the protagonist)...
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...Within Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, evidenced by Holden’s happiness, Holden begins his path to maturity when he accepts the Phoebe is “reaching for maturity” on the carousel, realizing that he needs to mentally heal and mature. Not being able to see everything good happening around us is common in our everyday life. We get used to the privileges, and we tunnel-vision in on the negatives of the world and yearn for escape. Holden, depressed and fantastical, grasps at the hopes for escape in the first three quarters of The Catcher in the Rye. The lack of the carousel symbol within the book before Holden’s change represent how he shied away from his journey to maturity. There are some major reasons as to why he shies away from maturity:...
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...Both Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and J.D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye are bildungsroman novels about a young character’s growth into adulthood. Written 67 years apart, both novels feature unusual protagonists who are somewhat innocent, naïve and desperate to reject the process of maturity and being ‘sivilized’. Twain focuses on a key moment in American history to ask readers to reassess the definition of “civilisation”, freedom, justice and social responsibility. Published in 1884, the novel relates to the pre-civil war years when the controversy over slavery corrupted America. Twain set his novel in 1860 prior to the abolition of slavery in order to criticise racist attitudes and uses the Mississippi River as the centre point of his novel. It symbolises the route toward freedom and escape for Huck and Jim providing the setting for the growth of both a young boy and a country struggling to understand definitions of freedom, individualism and civilisation. Salinger, however, uses his protagonist Holden to explore the materialistic, conformist society he saw developing after WW2. The first extract I chose is from chapter 22 of Catcher in the Rye where Phoebe accuses Holden of hating everything and everyone. Holden reveals here his fantasy of becoming ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ protecting children from falling into the adult world. This links with chapter 31 of Huckleberry Finn where Huck decides to write a letter to Tom Sawyer to tell Miss Watson where Jim...
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...Question 3 Author J.D. Salinger’s novel ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, takes up a bildungsroman or coming-of-age genre throughout the story. It is known that novels that take up the bildungsroman genre mainly focus on the protagonist of the story developing from their youth to adulthood in a psychological and moral way. Displaying the character changes and development throughout the plot is essential in this sort of genre. A sensitive and emotional protagonist in search for answers based on their own identity, life, and also gaining knowledge about the world and overcoming obstacles at the same time are all related to the concept of the bildungsroman genre. Thus, the genre is also identified as “coming-of-age”. In the Catcher in the Rye, Holden is a character who mainly experiences all these situations and eventually matures by the end of the novel. In “The Catcher in the Rye”, the novel introduces three main themes that associate with the bildungsroman genre. These themes are alienation, growing up, and corruption of innocence. Holden Caulfield is a boy who feels isolated from society. He feels isolated because he is convinced that he is excluded and victimized by everyone else around him. This causes him to have no motivation in order to complete his assignments, such as Mr Spencer’s history exam. As he was discussing with Mr Spencer about the game he states “what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game”, it shows that...
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...In the novel The Catcher in the Rye, J.D Salinger portrays a lost and confused teenager named Holden Caulfield; who is trying to find his place in life after getting kicked out of school. After going to New York to escape his annoying peers; he meets a series of people in the city that helps him find his goal in life. His dream was to be the Catcher in the Rye and preserve childhood innocence, but this dream was later destroyed with the realization that children must lose their innocence in order to grow up. Throughout the book Salinger uses an array of items that symbolize Holden’s position and thoughts on the world. One of the significant objects mentioned by Salinger is money. In J.D Salinger’s the Catcher in the Rye money is significant because it symbolizes the unfairness in society. In the novel money is constantly spent and earned with both a greedy and sympathetic mindset. To begin with, money is often earned and given to people with the worst morality. One of Pencey’s alumni Ossenburger is an extremely rich and powerful man, yet according to Holden Ossenburger is wealthy because of bad morale and trickery. “…you could get members of your family members for about five bucks apiece…” “He probably just shoves them in sacks and dumps them in the river anyway.” (22) This is an example of the negative examples of society. The family of the deceased are trusting Ossemburger with a beloved member of their family. Yet, Ossenburger betrays their trust by dumping the dead into...
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...The Catcher in the Rye “Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior.... Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now... And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry” (Salinger, 246). These humorous lines from J.D. Salinger’s classic, The Catcher in the Rye refer to the monolog by Holden Caulfield. Holden defies the societal standards for the young adult at the time. Collectively, the 1950s evokes visions of nostalgia. The Nuclear family model thrived and men scurried between desk jobs and houses with picket fences. But for the newly coined “teenagers”, this time was very different for them. This generation was right after the baby boomers. There was a lot of rules and guideline that the new generation didn’t want to be part of, thus, a period of experimentation. Throughout this turbulent account of Holden terrible year, Salinger underscores...
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...The question one must face later in life is why must someone need to lose innocence to mature? Innocence in a deeper complex understanding means absence of knowledge and our understanding of the fast paced life. Ordinarily one must face a fear and or take a leap of faith towards a dream to unmask oneself to the real world. Wrongfully some don't take those risks that life requires and can't accept that adolescence is a part of life. In the book Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger, Holden the main character displays the moral message of how adolescence plays a tremendous role in creating fear of the future. Salinger talks about himself as the 3rd person of a 16 year old boy who has many struggles of the everyday life. Holden had been kicked out...
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...| July 16, 1951 Books of The Times By NASH K. BURGER | THE CATCHER IN THE RYE By J. D. Salinger. | t is just before Christmas and 16-year-old Holden Caulfield has been kicked out of exclusive Pencey Prep, a boys' school in Pennsylvania. Considering everything, this reflects more credit on Holden than on Pencey. Life at Pencey is dreary, regimented, artificial and, of course, expensive. This happens, however, to be only the latest of a series of schools from which Holden has been expelled. Understandably he is in no hurry to encounter his parents, but he is also reluctant to linger a moment longer than necessary at Pencey. He therefore takes what money he has and departs for New York, where he passes several days in a weird jumble of adventures and experiences, is involved with a variety of persons including taxi drivers, two nuns, an elevator man, three girls from Seattle, a prostitute, and a former teacher from whom Holden thinks it best to flee in the middle of the night and most of all from himself. Holden's story is told in Holden's own strange, wonderful language by J. D. Salinger in an unusually brilliant novel, "The Catcher in the Rye." The Book-of-the-Month Club has chosen it as its current selection. Adolescence Speaking for Itself Holden is bewildered, lonely, ludicrous and pitiful. His troubles, his failings are not of his own making but of a world that is out of joint. There is nothing wrong with him that a little understanding and affection, preferably...
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...Coming of age is a life-long process all humans inevitably go through. This process of maturity can often be examined from fictional characters, such as Scout and Jem from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, and Jay Gatsby from The Great Gatsb by Scott Fitzgerald. Each of these characters encounters different processes of coming of age. When these characters process of maturation and coming of age are compared, the most relevant coming of age best exhibited by Holden from The Catcher in the Rye, following with Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird and Mr. Gatsby from The Great Gatsby; however, differences in coming of age are apparent in the different time periods of each novel setting, practicality, and present social issues. Holden Caulfield, the main character in The Catcher in the...
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...The use of language in J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, is an upper-class boy who has gone from one private school to another, searching for -- something. He expresses his frustrations in language highly characteristic of adolescence; his extremely colloquial speech sounds just like that of teenagers today, even though Salinger's novel was written in the 1950s. But a particularly striking factor of Holden's narration is his frequent use of the words "phony" and "crazy", as well as his ongoing lapse into second person -- "you". These characteristics attain greater significance given Holden's desperate need to actually reach out and communicate with someone, anyone, who just might understand him. The novel takes place in the two days following Holden's dismissal from his latest school, Pencey Prep. Much of this two-day period is spent either making or contemplating a huge number of assignations and phone calls, most of which are never made. Each of these represents an unsatisfied need to reach out, to affirm the validity of his place in the world at that moment and have it confirmed by the response of another person. In almost every case Holden holds back from really touching another person who could make a difference to him. In fact, his very name -- Holden -- may stand for this attitude of "holding", of keeping himself so close to the vest that he is unable to communicate with the people he so desperately...
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...Abbie Elliott Compare how Mark Twain and J.D. Salinger present the theme of rejection in extracts from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye. The extracts I have chosen see the central protagonists both rejecting society. In the extract from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck is discussing how Widow Douglas is trying to civilize him through educating him and dressing him in smart and respectable clothing. Huck rejects ‘civilized life’ and fears the rules and conformities of society. Likewise, in the extract from The Catcher in the Rye, Holden has been expelled from Pencey and gets the train to New York, where attempts to flirt with one of his classmate’s mothers. Here Holden also rejects the expected social norms. This is because he has been treated like a dissident and a disappointment for most of his life, but he functions under the attitude that the problem lies within the ‘phony’ society and their expectations of him. Rejection is an occurrence in both novels, however, the difference being Huck was brought up with no education, no understanding of social standards and no rules imposed on him. Now he has been forced into a civilized life which he dreads. On the other hand, Holden has been educated and disciplined from a young age and he appears to be well behaved. However, later on in the novel we discover he pretends to be someone he not and very often breaks social norms. Both writers present the theme of rejection by aiming to portray a young...
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...Growing up can be a very easy process or a very difficult process, it all matters on how the person looks at it. Holden Caulfield from the book The Catcher in the Rye, takes growing up as a difficult process. He likes to make things a burden to do. Holden makes becoming an adult more difficult by being self-centered, using vulgar language, and wanting the responsibilities of a child but being able to do what anything an adult could. Holden Caulfield struggles with growing up throughout the book as kid’s today struggle with similar social problems. Holden across the span of book worries about himself and no one else. He tends to push things away and fend for his own self, because he feels people are phonies, or just to fake to be with. Salinger writes “You never saw so many phonies in all your life, everybody smoking their ears off and talking about the play so that everybody could hear and know how sharp they were” (Salinger126). Here holden quickly jumps to conclusion that everyone in the building are phonies, when he doesn’t even know anyone. Because Holden cannot place himself into other people shoes to consider their point of view or to hear what they have to say, he struggles connecting with anyone that isn’t already in relation with him. So instead he labels them as phonies. This is one of the many social issues that keep Holden from maturing and growing up to be an adult. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a cognitive neuroscientist from University College London, UK, found in...
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...Loss of Innocence Ones loss of innocence can be over time or lost by an abrupt choice. In the two books Fahrenheit 451 and Catcher in the Rye both characters lose their innocence over time by the choices they make. Guy Montag the main character in F451 loses his innocence over time by collecting books without even knowing which is against the system he lives in. Holden Caulfield also loses his innocence over time by growing up into an adult and tries to save children’s innocence throughout the book. Even though ones loss of innocence can be made by an abrupt choice, ones loss of innocence in these two books is a gradual experience. The concept of innocence is one that is applied to childhood. Children, for example, are innocent because they have not been tainted by the idea that the world is not as it seems to be. But, as children grow up and mature fully into adults, the loss of this pure quality of innocence begins to be noticed in a person’s life. As this awareness comes forth, it shows that life is not always easy, it is complicated and there will be tough moral decisions that have to be made. Holden Caulfield the main character of Catcher in the Rye wants to preserve innocence so he dedicates his life to protecting childhood innocence. In Chapter two Mr. Spencer tells Holden, “Life is game that one plays according to the rules”. Holden does not believe that life is a game he believes that life is dictated by adults. These adults are phony and cruel and he does not...
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