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J.d. salinger’s writing style catcher in the rye
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J.d. salinger’s writing style catcher in the rye
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Unlike many stories, the main character in The Catcher in the Rye is an antagonist. In the following paragraphs, the comparisons between Holden and two killers, David Chapman and John Hinckley, will prove if Hoden has the potential of becoming a criminal and some of the conspiracy theories and the reasons behind will be mentioned as well. John Hinckley, the man who tried assassinate Ronald Reagan, and David Chapman, the killer of John Lennon, both had a copy of the book near them. After killing Lennon, Chapman dropped his gun and took out the Although book was not designed to turn children into cold-blooded killers, people say the CIA and the FBI use the book as a mind-control device in order to orchestrate assassination. Hinckley grew up in University Park ,Texas , and attended Highland Park High School in Dallas County. During his grade school years , he played football , basketball , hockey, soccer, and basketball. He learned to play the piano and was elected class president twice. Holden was also an athlete before he got kicked out of Pencey. In the beginning of the book, Holden states : " I was the goddam manager of …show more content…
the fencing team. Very big deal. " ( Salinger , pg 3 ). Holden is telling us he was productive person before he got kicked out school just like Hinckley. John Hinckley spent seven years in college to become a songwriter but failed.
He wrote to his parents with tales of misfortune and pleas for money. He spoke to his girlfriend, Lynn Collin, who turned out be fabrication. In September 1976 , he returned to his parents' house because he didn't have any friends. Shortly after Holden gets off the Penn Station, He feels like calling someone, but he couldn't think of anybody to call. " ...,but as soon as I was inside, I couldn't think of anyone to call up ....So I ended up not calling anybody. I came out of the booth , after about twenty minutes or so... " ( Salinger, Pg 59). This quote shows the similarity between Holden and John Hinckley. They both didn't have anyone to talk to. Holden and Hinckley desperately wanted someone to be there for them, but they couldn’t talk to anyone they
trusted. Holden is close with his brother and sister, but at this point of the novel D.B is all the way in Hollywood and his sister is back at home. Both of them felt they were isolated and were on their journeys alone. John Hinckley became obsessed with the 1976 film Taxi Driver in which Travis Bickle attempts to assassinate the prudential candidate. Hinckley developed an infatuation for the actress which played the young prostitute named Jodie Foster. When Foster moved to Yale, he moved there for a brief time to stalk her by taking a writing class and slipping poems under her door. Failing to develop any meaningful contact with her, he fantasized about committing suicide to get her attention. On March 30 , 1981 , Hinckley made another attempt to impress Foster. He shot President Ronald Reagan and three other men outside of the Washington Hilton Hotel. Reagan was leaving the hotel after giving a speech to a gathering of union members when Hinckley key fired several shots at the president and a group of his attendants. Reagan's press secretary , James Brandy, got struck in the head. A police officer was shot in the back and another Hinckley's bullets hit one of the president's lungs. Chapman reported he lived in the dread of his father, who would beat his mother , and that he would wake up hearing his mother scream out his name. He reports having fantasized about getting a gun and killing his father. In 1971, Chapman became a born again Presbyterian and distributed books Biblical tracts. It was that year he met his first girlfriend named Jessica Blankenship. He began to work as a YMCA summer camp counselor; he was. Rey popular with the children, who nicknamed him "Nemo". He won an award for Outstanding Counselor and was made assistant director. Those who knew him in the caretaking professions called unanimously called him an outstanding worker. In The Catcher In the Rye , Holden mentions he feels like he needs to be the rescuer of all the children who might suffer in their lives. They can continue along with their innocence and he will be there for them. In addition to Holden, David Chapman used to have the same mindset because of his abusive mother. He reported he lived in the dread of his father, who would beat his mother frequently and wake up hearing his mother scream out his name. Chapman joined his girlfriend as a student at Covenant College and fell behind on his studies. He became obsessed with guilt over having an affair and started to have suicidal thoughts. He dropped out of college and his girlfriend broke up with him soon after. He was a big Beatles fan, idolizing Lennon, and played guitar himself. He turned on him after becoming born-again because Lennon claimed the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Conspiracy theorists suggest The Catcher in the Rye is responsible for turning innocent people into assassins.
Foster’s characteristics of the QUEST are the quester, the destination, the purpose, the challenges along the way, and the reason behind going to the destination. In The Catcher in the Rye Holden is the quester who begins his journey by being kicked out of Pencey Prep. He decides to go on a trip instead of going home and revealing to his parents that he has been expelled. Staying around New York is a challenge in itself, and by the end of his trip Holden realizes more about himself. Some of the challenges he faces are his immaturity levels getting in the way of certain tasks and his loneliness. At the end of his trip Holden begins to have a new sense of maturity, and is ready to grow up.
Since Holden was isolated from his family, in order to not get hurt again he tries to find hypocrisy in people to stop himself from trusting others. Holden feels isolated after being sent to a boarding school that “was full of phonies” by his parents (Salinger 90). Salinger’s message to the audience with this quote is that when
At Pencey Prep Holden feels isolated and like he doesn’t belong. For example Holden feels isolated when he described his feelings during the football game as this “Anyway it was the Saturday of the football game… I was standing way the hell up on
Holden, before leaving for New York, attended a boarding school named Pencey Prep. He makes it clear that he thinks everyone, teachers and students alike, is a “phony.” At one point, his roommate Stradlater goes out with a girl who ends up being Jane Gallagher, a childhood friend and crush of Holden. In his eyes, this is a betrayal. Holden is annoyed
Holden's Seperateness in Catcher in the Rye In ‘The Catcher In The Rye’ Salinger sets about making Holden appear separate from everyone else. He does this through a variety of methods. One of the ways in which Salinger shows this separateness is through Holden’s relationships and encounters with his family and friends. Another method that Salinger uses is that usually whenever Holden attempts to contact someone they are either not there or don’t answer the phone, this give us the feeling that Holden is by himself, alone, separate from everyone else. Also the fact that Holden says ‘my address book only has about three people in it’ gives us again the impression that Holden is disconnected from society.
I would like to discuss how Holden’s misinterpretation of the Robert Burns poem, “Coming Through the Rye”, sums up his deepest desires by taking a journey through his troubled adolescence and his journey to self–discovery that results in his breakdown. According to Phoebe, the original line in the poem is “if a body meet a body”. However, Holden’s misinterpretation of “if a body catch a body” removes all sexual connotations from the original poem. Holden is a deeply disturbed adolescent in search of a way to preserve his childhood innocence. His “red hunting cap” is a symbol of his uniqueness and his rejection to conform to society.
Holden alienates himself by believing he is better than everybody else. Every time Holden meets or talks about someone he is judgemental. Even when he is talking about someone he spends time with, he cannot help but ridicule them, “I never even once saw him [Ackley] brush his teeth....he had a lot of pimples. Not just on his forehead or his chin, like most guys, but all over his whole face. And not only that, he had a terrible personality. He was also sort of a nasty guy. I wasn't too crazy about him, to tell you the truth.”(Salinger,14 ). Ackley is probably the closest thing to a friend Holden has. Yet he criticizes him is a very nitpicky way, convincing himself he does not like
Another trait that was portrayed throughout the novel was peculiarity. The teenage boy Ackley who lives across the hall from Holden is very strange and has few friends. Ackley was very dirty, never brushed his teeth, and almost always stayed alone in his room. Holden says " His teeth were always mossy- looking, and he was dirty as hell, but he always had clean fingernails."(pg.22)
Next, he mentions his mistake of leaving fencing equipment on the subway that prevented the fencing team from competing in an away match at McBurney School and forced them to return to school early. This prompted the whole team to “ostracize” him the whole way back, but his response was “it was pretty funny, in a way” (Salinger, 6). The act of carelessness Holden possesses, shows the lack of dedication in the jobs he is provided with. In addition, he states that he “forgot to tell” that he was kicked out of Pencey Prep due to flunking four out of five subjects (Salinger, 6). Another act of ignorance is shown, and he fails to see the importance of his academics and athletic duties. This is similar to the author, J.D. Salinger, who attended McBurney School, but did not excel in school, and the main character, Huckleberry Finn from the novel, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because Huckleberry does not like
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, is home to the protagonist Holden Caulfield. There is no coincidence that he holds a striking resemblance to the author of the novel himself. Salinger seemed to have a similar childhood as Holden describes in The Catcher in the Rye. Both men also seemed to have a certain fascination with younger children, especially younger women. J.D. Salinger based one of his most famous characters, Holden Caulfield, on personal experience.
“All I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told you about. [….] Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody” (Salinger 277). Holden Caulfield comes in contact with many females throughout the novel. Some of them are for better, and some cause him to be more depressed. Holden is currently in a mental institution. He is telling a psychoanalyst everything that has happened to him a few weeks before last Christmas. In J.D. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye the author demonstrates how two characters can help Holden hold his sanity or can make his whole world fall apart through the use of Sally and Phoebe to show that relationships can be difficult and confusing or the exact opposite.
The Catcher in the Rye Essay Through Salinger's use of symbolism, as a society, he depicts the importance of preserving innocence. We want to save our innocence. In court, people try to plead not guilty, meaning that they are innocent. Holden Caulfield tries to protect kids from becoming guilty. He wants to make people never become guilty.
In The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Holden is in a rest home, where he speaks about his past and discusses his thoughts and feelings of his memories. Holden tells about his life including his past experiences at many different private schools, most recently Pensey Prep, his friends, and his late brother Allie which led to Holden’s own mental destruction.
“Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules”( Salinger 12). The Catcher in the Rye is a coming- of- age novel by J.D Salinger, in which Holden Caulfield, the teenage protagonist is unable to play by the rules. His life has been full of very lonely experiences, great trauma and the pain of the loss of his innocence. He is an unusual sixteen year-old boy, who has been expelled from a private school because of academic failure. “Holden’s central goal is to resist the process of maturity itself” (Sparknotes). In The Catcher in the Rye, the catcher’s mitt is a symbol of Holden’s loss of innocence and is portrayed by Holden Caulfield and throughout the book. The symbol of the catcher's mitt is a recurring point that develops throughout the story.
The book, Catcher in the Rye, has been steeped in controversy since it was banned in America after its first publication. John Lennon’s assassin Mark Chapman, asked the former Beatle to sign a copy of the book earlier in the morning of the day he murdered Lennon. Police found the book in his possession upon apprehending the psychologically disturbed Chapman. However, the book itself contains nothing that might have lead Chapman to act as he did. It could have been just any book that he was reading the day he decided to kill John Lennon and as a result, it was the Catcher in the Rye, a book describing a nervous breakdown, that caused the media to speculate widely about the possible connection. This gave the book even more recognition. The character Holden Caulfield ponders the thoughts of death, accuses ordinary people of being phonies, and expresses his love for his sister through out the novel. So what is the book Catcher in the Rye really about?