Friday, May 14, 2010

Catcher in the Rye-Aleia Amaya

Holden ends the story of The Catcher in the Rye by saying "Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."(214) This shows many of Holden’s emotional and physical mind sets. He has attachment issues to anybody and everybody who enters his life, even for minutes at a time.
Throughout the story symbols similar to this are shown. The ducks constantly leaving widely catch the interest of Holden because of their flight pattern. He is constantly asking strangers if they know where “the ducks go in the wintertime?” (80). Then we see his attachment again while talking about the museum because “nobody’d move…nobody’d be different”(121)
His attachment to his little sister, Phoebe, is what brings him home in the end. This goes back to both the duck and museum symbolism. Holden is constantly lonely and having Phoebe back in his life made him “so damn happy all of a sudden”(213). Finally, Holden found his happiness and his comfort back in the people he had been avoiding. His family.
The Catcher in the Rye story Holden talks about catching all of the kids coming out of the rye as his job. He wants to keep all of the bad things from getting in the way of kids lives. Just like how he sees the F-word throughout all of the walls and gets angered because of the corruption it could cause for his sister and her friends. Holden is growing up, and realizing that obstacles come in life no matter what. All he wants is to protect who he can, because he’s tired of losing people in his life.


work cited:
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. Little, Brown, 1951. Print.

1 comment:

  1. I definetly agree! Towards thwe end of the novel you see Holden sort of longing to be around the ones he loves, which would be his family. Also, he wants to keep children innocent in a way by not letting them fall over the cliff, like Holden has. He doesn't want the children to end up like him, and he is willing to "catch" them before they do.

    ReplyDelete