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Essays on how jd salingers life affects his books
Essays on how jd salingers life affected his books
J. D. Salinger essay
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The Judgmental Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, is a classic novel about a sixteen-year-old boy, Holden Caulfield, who speaks of a puzzling time in his life. Holden has only a few days until his expulsion from Pency Prep School. He starts out as the type of person who can't stand "phony" people. He believes that his school and everyone in it is phony, so he leaves early. He then spends three aimless days in New York City. During this time, Holden finds out more about himself and how he relates to the world around him. He believes that he is the catcher in the rye: " I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in a big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around-nobody big, I mean-except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What have I to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff..." (173). He briefly enters what he believes is adulthood and becomes a "phony" himself. By the end of the story, Holden realizes he doesn't like the type of person he has become, so he reverts into an idealist; a negative, judgmental person.
Holden's idealism is first brought forth when he describes his life at Pency Prep. It is full of phonies, morons and bastards. His roommate, Stradlater, " was at least a pretty friendly guy, It was partly a phony kind of friendly..." (26) and his other roommate, Ackley is "a very nosy bastard" (33). Holden can't stand to be around either one of them for a very long time. Later, he gets into a fight with Stradlater over his date with Jane. Holden is upset because he thinks that Stradlater "gave her the time" and that he doesn't care about her; 'the reason he didn't care was because he was a goddam stupid moron. All morons hate it when you call them a moron' (44). Holden not only sees his roommates as phonies and bastards, but he also sees his headmaster at Pency Prep as a "phony slob" (3). This type of person is exactly what Holden doesn't want to be. He strives to be a mature adult; caring, compassionate, and sensitive.
Even when Holden goes out or reads a story, it is just full of phoniness, ".
Holden Caulfield, the teenage protagonist of Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger, struggles with having to enter the adult world. Holden leaves school early and stays in New York by himself until he is ready to return home. Holden wants to be individual, yet he also wants to fit in and not grow up. The author uses symbolism to represent Holden’s internal struggle.
In the novel, Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, Holden Caulfield is an example of a prosaic rich adolescent boy,with a pedestrian set of problems, but a psychoanalysis reveals that Holden has a plethora of atypical internal conflicts. Internal conflicts that other students at Pencey, such as Stradlater and Ackley, would not normally experience.
Holden Caulfield, portrayed in the J.D. Salinger novel Catcher in the Rye as an adolescent struggling to find his own identity, possesses many characteristics that easily link him to the typical teenager living today. The fact that the book was written many years ago clearly exemplifies the timeless nature of this work. Holden's actions are those that any teenager can clearly relate with. The desire for independence, the sexually related encounters, and the questioning of ones religion are issues that almost all teens have had or will have to deal with in their adolescent years. The novel and its main character's experiences can easily be related to and will forever link Holden with every member of society, because everyone in the world was or will be a teen sometime in their life.
Catcher in the Rye, by J.D Salinger is about a boy named Holden Caulfield who struggles with the codes of conduct his upper class lifestyle follows. For Holden, loss of innocence is not about smoking a cigarette as much as it is about his realization that the rules placed on him by society are phony. Holden distracts himself by focusing on his feelings of alienation because he does not want to face his own deep sadness over his own loss of innocence.
Psychoanalysis is a theory that explores personality traits on the conscious and unconscious level. According to TheFreeDictionary.com, “Psychoanalysis is the most intensive form of an approach to treatment called psychodynamic therapy. Psychodynamic refers to a view of human personality that results from interactions between conscious and unconscious factors. The purpose of all forms of psychodynamic treatment is to bring unconscious mental material and processes into full consciousness so that the patient can gain more control over his or her life” (Psychoanalytic Treatment). Sigmund Freud is the founder of the Psychoanalysis Theory. He had many followers. One of those followers was Jung. As time went on, Jung’s perspective on personality
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger is a coming-of-age novel set in New York during the 1940’s. Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of the story, is a detached seventeen-year old boy harboring feelings of isolation and disillusionment. He emphasizes a general dislike for society, referring to people as “phonies.” His lack of will to socialize prompts him to find nearly everything depressing. He’s alone most of the time and it’s apparent that he is very reclusive. This often leads him to pondering about his own death and other personal issues that plague him without immediate resolution. Holden possesses a strong deficit of affection – platonic and sexual – that hinders and cripples his views toward people, his attitude, and his ability to progressively solve his problems without inflicting pain on himself. The absence of significant figures in his life revert him to a childlike dependency and initiate his morbid fascination with sexuality. In this novel, Salinger uses Sunny, Sally Hayes, and Carl Luce to incorporate the hardships of discovering sexual identity and how these events affect adolescents as they try to understand their own sexuality.
The human psyche is formed by conflict. The mind is in a constant state of figurative war – subconscious antitheses and opposites vying for control of the conscious self. Psychic cohesion relies on the resolution and balance of these opposites. In his essay On the Nature of the Psyche, Carl Jung delves into the conflict within the psychic spectrum. The most base level of the unconscious (he uses the Gnostic term “hylic” to describe it) focuses on the instinctual and the immediate, temporal world. It exists in direct contrast to the highest level, the pneumatic (another Gnostic title), a “supraconcious” wherein spirituality and intellect reign. Robertson Davies’ novel Fifth Business symbolizes this antithesis in the characters of Boy Staunton and Dunstan Ramsay. Boy represents the materialistic, sex-obsessed lower psychic realm. His attitude towards woman, guilt, and mythology illustrate the manifestation of the hylic level of the psyche. Dunstan is the direct counterpoint to Boy. Where Boy demonstrates a fixation on physical sexuality, Dunstan distances himself from any material sensuality. Where Boy only worships a capitalist god created in his image, Dunstan pursues a world of saints and spirituality. Dunstan is evidently a representation of the pneumatic complex. As the characters personify this psychic contrast, their respective failings reveal another crucial concept of the mind. When consciousness primarily exists in one specific psychic dimension, the psyche is no longer complete. The opposite half goes unrecognized. At the end of the novel, Dunstan eventually has a revelation that continues to elude Boy: establishing equilibrium betw...
Mass incarceration has caused the prison’s populations to increase dramatically. The reason for this increase in population is because of the sentencing policies that put a lot of men and women in prison for an unjust amount of time. The prison population has be caused by periods of high crime rates, by the medias assembly line approach to the production of news stories that bend the truth of the crimes, and by political figures preying on citizens fear. For example, this fear can be seen in “Richard Nixon’s famous campaign call for “law and order” spoke to those fears, hostilities, and racist underpinnings” (Mauer pg. 52). This causes law enforcement to focus on crimes that involve violent crimes/offenders. Such as, gang members, drive by shootings, drug dealers, and serial killers. Instead of our law agencies focusing their attention on the fundamental causes of crime. Such as, why these crimes are committed, the family, and preventive services. These agencies choose to fight crime by establishing a “War On Drugs” and with “Get Tough” sentencing policies. These policies include “three strikes laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and juvenile waives laws which allows kids to be trialed as adults.
Holden had a tough time fitting in at his schools because he thought of almost everyone as phonies. "`It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques' (pg. 131)." He seems to have a history of expulsion and failure at various schools because of his lack of ability to cope with others. Ordinary problems of his had turned into major conflicts with other students. "I hate fist fights. I don't mind getting hit so much - although I'm not crazy about it, naturally - but what scares me most in a fist fight is the guy's face. I can't stand looking at the other guy's face, is my trouble. It wouldn't be so bad if you could both be blindfolded or something. It's a funny kind of yellowness, when you come to think of it, but it's yellowness, all right. I'm not kidding myself. (pg. 90)" Holden got into a fight with his roommate at school because he was going out with his ex-girlfriend. He's afraid that the guy is taking her from him, even though he's not with her anymore. These are problems that are normal, but Holden has trouble dealing with them.
There comes a time in every person’s life when they begin to take notice of the fake people that exist in the world around them. For main character, Holden Caulfield, in J.D. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye, this time begins in Holden’s teenage years. As he begins to observe the authenticity of the people in he encounters, he notices a vast difference between those he identifies as phony over those who are true to themselves. Holden is a teenage boy, who attends the school of Pencey Prep, but is later kicked out due to the minimal effort he puts into his schoolwork. He then decides to seek out New York, where he encounters new people in the ‘adult world’. There are several instances where he makes a personal judgement as to whether
Carl Jung was born in 1875 in the country of Switzerland and later passed in 1961. He was a very influential psychologist who founded the habits of analytic psychology in response to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. He had many findings and research that still affect psychology today. As a child, Jung spent most of his time alone and, thus, had a rather disappointing childhood. He felt happiest wh...
Around 1913, Jung began to argue Freud's view that all complexes or dysfunctional patterns of behavior and emotion are created by sexual trauma (Myers, 2008). The relationship between Jung and Freud began to dissipate as Freud couldn't come to terms with Jung's erroneous interest in spiritualism and it's physical counterpart, parapsychology. Jung and Freud's relationship ultimately soured after the publication of Jung's Symbols of Transformation, which dove into the world of mythological symbols (Myers, 2008). In breaking free from Freud and psychoanalysis, Jung incorporated the idea of phenomenal representation to develop the fields of analytical and archetypal psychology (Kirsch, 2000; Schopenhauer, 1999).
What Orff is trying to say here is that he does not use "old" material, but
ESTP (Extroverted sensing with thinking): These are action-oriented people, often sophisticated, sometimes ruthless -- our "James Bonds." As mates, they are exciting and charming, but they have trouble with commitment. They make good promoters, entrepreneurs, and con artists.
Carl Jung was a great, yet, controversial psychological theorist of the twentieth century. Originally, he worked side by side with his role model, Sigmund Freud. Subsequently, the two faced many theoretical clashes and parted to conduct their own research. Mainly, Carl Jung remains famous for his research and discoveries on the collective unconscious, that consists of archetypes absorbed through dreams, myths and symbols.