Hi. I've been wanting to write a post dedicated to one of my all-time favorite novels, The Catcher in The Rye but I've got no time to write about it and honestly, I don't know what to write about that amazing book and I'm afraid that I will not be able to justify the awesomeness of The Catcher in The Rye.
The Catcher in The Rye is a book that has no beginning and no ending. It is just like that. Maybe it's like a diary of Holden Caulfield, the main character of this book. And his story was sad. He was lost and he was stuck between the adulthood and the childhood. The main problem of this story is that he didn't want to grow up. All adults he met, according to him, were too phony. Nobody really listened to him. If you reread the story, you'll notice that whenever he was about to talk to someone, he always began the dialog with "listen!" but no one really listened to him. Not the nun, the cab driver even the prostitute that he paid, didn't want to listen. He desperately wanted to stop the time. He wanted to freeze the time.
"The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move.... Nobody'd be different"
In that sentence, I can conclude that Holden wished that his life was like things in museum. Frozen still. Not moving. Holden feared changes, he hated changes so he wanted everything to stay the same, like everything that was at the museum.
Another thing I learn about Holden is that he wanted to protect innocence. All the adults he met were selfish and ignorant and he didn't want kids to grow up and lose their innocence, that's why he wanted to stop the time, to stop changes, so that no kid would actually grow up. He wanted to be the catcher in the rye.
"I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all."
That thought of Holden described how he wanted to protect the innocence of children. How he didn't want children to be like all the adults he met. How he wanted to keep the spirit of kids, their purity. He wanted to catch them before they fall to the adulthood zone. He wanted them to stay young forever and here, we can see how naive Holden actually was. His view of the world was too crazy. He was way too far from the reality and he was desperate because no one can really understand his struggle and his past. The only adult who understood him was dead. Another person who can understand him was his sister, who was still a kid. Phoebe was the only one who listened to Holden in the novel and she was a kid, another reason why Holden thought that adults were phony. Another reason why he wanted to protect children's spirit.
Another famous quotation from this book is where Holden asked the cab driver what happened to the ducks in the lake when the water freezes over the winter. It's a metaphor. From my point of view, he was asking what will happen to him if he accepts the changes in his life. He was the ducks and the lake was the changes. What will happen to the ducks when the water freeze? Will the ducks survive? What will happen to him when he grow up? Or maybe the question Holden wanted to ask was "will he survive?"
During the winter, the ducks flew to seek for a warmer weather and they will come back again in spring. For me, it represents that changes are temporary and cyclical. Changes happen all the time. When changes happen, things might get harder at first, but in the end, you'll get used to it. Just like the ducks, they can find their way to accept the changes during winter and face it with their own way and so can Holden, he just didn't know how.
Well, those things are what I underlined on my book and I had to reread the book 3 times to actually be able to grasp the full idea of the book. It is a beautiful book and I think most people my age can relate to Holden. We are all confused, lost and we wanted to be listened, to be heard. We fear changes, I think most people do and some of us do not know how to deal with changes. Some of us do not know how to deal with losing but we are all trying to find our own way to deal with life, to deal with adulthood.
I actually also did a research on Salinger, the writer of the book. He grew up in war zone, where innocence were lost, where innocence were corrupted and maybe that was why he wrote The Catcher in The Rye. He, himself wanted to protect the innocence of other people since he didn't really get to protect his own innocence due to the war. Maybe he didn't want other people to lose what he had lost during the war. The purity of a child, an optimism and a spirit.
P.s: Well, these are all purely based on my own understanding and if you have a different understanding than it's okay. It's a public book and we are all have rights to interpret it whatever way we want. It'd be delightful if whoever reading this blog (probably no one lol) can share their own thoughts because this book is really great and awesome. And if you haven't read the book, well... GO READ IT!
bye!
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