1."But on one side of the portal… was a wild rose-bush… which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in…” (Chapter 1, pg.41)…
In chapters 9 through 12, I feel that a lot of my strengths of my journal are identifying symbols and their meanings for Holden. There are quite a few examples in these four chapters; for example, the ducks in the pond, Phoebe, and not calling Jane. However, I struggled with finding out why Holden keeps mentioning ducks and the pond; I have not yet found out by my own yet, but I think I’m getting close. From class discussion, it seems that some people think that Holden can be the duck. He can be seen as the duck in which ducks migrate when it’s winter. In this case, the duck is Holden and the winter is growing up. He is purposefully isolating himself, so that the winter/ adulthood doesn’t get to him. I will try to build more on the theme of isolation and symbols in the next few chapters.…
In the letter from Scout to Jem, we see Scout's’ point of view and how she feels. It shows that she is sad that Boo gave them so much and they did not give him anything in return like a good neighbor should have. To convey this, a flowery background symbolizes a neighbor's job to look after one another and the items in the pouch exhibits what Scout and Jem were given I feel that this establishes a feeling of growing maturity because the flowery background also symbolizes the growth of a young girl at the stage of coming of age experiences were a young bud becomes a flower not yet too old to shine like glitter which reveals that pouch holding items is like the pouch of a mother kangaroo because they hold their young in that pouch and Boo cares…
I found this quote very peculiar at first, because most people would interpret someone saying…
Quote: “Oh, I passed English all right. It was mostly literature, though. I only wrote about two compositions the whole term. I flunked oral expression, though. They had this course you had to take, Oral Expression. That I flunked” (p. 201).…
After reading the first third of the book The Catcher in the Rye, the main event that I thought had a huge impact towards the plot is the part where Holden goes off on Stradlater after his date with Jane. Not much actually happened so far in the book to determine the main event but I think this one had a huge impact on Holden’s life.…
Although Holden calls Sally a phony, he still decides to spend a night with her. In his head, he continues to say how much he hates Sally and how much she annoys him, yet he expresses that he loves her. Holden extends his contradiction by necking with Sally in the back of the cab, and still continues to think about the fact that he hates her. “I told her I loved her and all. It was a lie, of course.”(125) Holden’s actual thoughts about Sally stick out from the other statements through the use of first person point of view. Holden even goes as far as trying to run away with Sally. He expresses a want of running away and living on their own, right after calling her a pain in the ass. “I was getting excited as hell the more I thought about it, and I sort of reached over and took old Sally’s goddam hand. What a goddam fool I was.” (132) This contradiction was shown through the use of first person point of…
Holden explains to Sally Hayes all of the different cliques at the private prep schools he has attended. Holden did not feel that he belonged to any certain clique or group. This saddened him and made him feel like an outsider. I can relate to this feeling. Many teens feel that they do not fit into the cool clique or group. Everyone yearns for a sense of belonging just like Holden. He also said all the people he went to school with were phony. That is also the way I feel at times. This was one opinion Holden expressed that I agreed with…
Similar observations are made by academic writer and author Sarah Graham in her book entitled Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. In this book, Graham addresses a variety of reading techniques, themes, and comparisons/contrasts in regards to Salinger’s most popular novel, but she specifically addresses the main theme of Holden’s attempt to escape the phony 1950’s materialistic focused society surrounding him. Graham begins her take on this theme of escaping society with a chapter on Holden’s rebellion: “Developing the theme of rebellion, Holden’s visit to Mr. Spencer confirms that he is opposed to the conventional ideas that school and society encourage in order to promote stability” (34). During this visit to Mr. Spencer’s house that Graham…
I can relate to Holden Caulfiled because he refuses to talk about his early life. I do not like to talk about my early life because those memories can be very emotional.…
“Good people... are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure”. This quote from William Saroyan means that wise people acquire their insight from experiences, especially unsuccessful ones. I agree with the quote and the idea of people being knowledgeable because of the hardships and journeys they had endured. The two novels Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger both support the idea of gaining wisdom through experience.…
In this novel, Holden Caulfield gets kicked out of his school and stays in New York for a couple of days before returning home. During his travels Holden does not maintain any relationships and he associates most adults with being phony. He is constantly trying to protect himself and his sister Phoebe from being exposed to the harsh adult world. In The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger uses rhetorical devices to explain Holden’s struggles and establish the theme of preserving his own innocence and the innocence of those around him.…
Everyone has had a dream job since they were small, it might have changed over time but it was always something they loved. In “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger we meet Holden whose dream job is to be a catcher in the rye. Holden states that in his dream job he would “catch everyone if they start to go over the cliff- I mean if they’re running and they don’t see where they’re going I have to come out of somewhere and catch them.” (Salinger, 173)…
Imagine what it feels like to be a teenager. Is a teenager considerate and open minded? The novel The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger talks about a teenager named Holden Caulfield who tells his story about a school named Pency Prep in Pennsylvania, away from his sister and parents. Throughout most of this book, Holden explains his inner thoughts regarding everyone he knows, and most of them are judgmental. Holden is considered to be a typical American teenager in this novel. First of all, teenagers like to express their thoughts. In Sylvia Plath’s article “Sylvia Plath at Seventeen”, she begins saying,“As of today I have decided to keep a diary again―just a place where I can write my thoughts and opinions when I have a moment. Somehow I…
The genuine joy Holden gets from watching Phoebe is a striking image of his fantasies of innocence and his collapsing psyche. For a moment Holden sees the joy that he envisions all the children of his rye field are like. Within Phoebe’s happiness Holden is transfixed and distraught, because the sudden realization that he is transitioning to a world he does not feel equipped for triggers the end of his ambivalence. As the carousel spins so does Holden’s reality, he loses sense of even further sense of himself. The Catcher in the Rye is a bildungsroman, but it is unique in how Holden not only resists growing up, but also he ends the novel more unstable and lost than he started off as. A quest or journey is supposed to lead to a literal or metaphorical…