The Catcher In The Rye Dialectical Journal

Write Fiction 2 (The Novel)
Assignment Six
Part One (a)
‘To prove their point, the agents in charge showed the rest of us what happened to the non Compliant. Max was shot through the chest. Taya’s throat was cut and Nora was hung. They were all 14, Taya had her birthday the day before. Her parents had booked her in a party at the zoo. She had this obsession with monkeys.
‘Madeline had spent the entire week before comforting these kids. Telling them not to worry, her daddy was in the Army and he wouldn’t let anyone hurt us. That he’d come rescue everyone.’
I watched as tears formed in her father’s eyes.
‘She said you had to. You’d already lost your wife. You were all each other had. You and her dog, a cocker spaniel cross pug that you couldn’t

I still hadn’t told him exactly what had happened.
‘Maddie visited me in ICU and got punished for it. Her injuries weren’t physically as bad, but it caused a lot of psychological issues and she had nightmares afterwards.’
I watched as the General’s face went red and he swallowed.
‘Over the next two years, she protested what they did. Our treatment, our punishment, our training. That girl of yours had spirit. The man responsible for us was careful not to punish her as much as the rest of us. Especially after your promotion.
‘Then she was told she had to kill a kid,’ I told him, wiping my tears away. ‘She had fought off people twice her size, out run most others, did what she had to in order to survive. But the final test was our ability to kill, with hesitation, without mercy. Preparation for stopping the terrorists roaming our streets.’
He looked at me shocked.
‘She had refused so many times. She didn’t agree with it. With what they were doing. These were innocent people and we had no proof they were terrorists. She was beaten time and time again. She spent nights in our apartment crying for you. She couldn’t understand why you hadn’t

As well as, an understanding behind not just Alexis’s own desire for revenge and freedom but also to show the reader that a lot of the agents are misunderstood and only commit murder and follow orders because they have no other choice.
I achieved this by using the scene in the church where Alexis meets Maddie’s father, the Army’s General, who is religious. They sit at the steps of the pulpit and Alexis explains to him what happened to his daughter. Here, he hears about Maddie’s fate for the first time. He had spent the past seven years searching for her. He had begun to believe she was killed by terrorists. I wanted the reader to feel the anger and pain that the General would be going through hearing it all.
My goal was also to have the scene show how they break down the agents, desensitize them and what they take away from children as young at nine (noted elsewhere) and what they planned on doing to Grace (three years old). And give a bit more detail about Alexis’s