Wednesday's lesson notes

The Catcher in the Rye

p.156 – ‘I’d just be the catcher in the rye, and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”

- In this metaphor the field of rye clearly represents childhood and childhood innocence. The grain, rye is young and growing, and the children are playing in this field. At the bottom of the cliff is adulthood. In this metaphor then, adolescence is clearly the fall and this would explain Holden’s feelings about his life at the time.

- By wanting to be the catcher in the rye, Holden wants to protect the children and save them from both the fall (adolescence) and the landing at the bottom (adulthood).

How does Holden see the stages of life?

Childhood:

-          Holden sees childhood as a good time, a time of innocence, a time in which he wants children to stay.

Adolescence:

-          Holden sees adolescence as a time of significant change, a time in between where you don’t know where you really belong. Sometimes Holden acts like a child and acknowledges this. Sometimes he seems to try to mimic adult behavior.  Is the novel suggesting that this is the epitome of adolescence and that being a teenager is about not knowing where your place is. Holden is confused and fears change. We see this in his attitude to the museum (page…). We also see this on p178 when he says, “Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I’d never get to the other side of the street.”

What is Holden’s attitude to sex?

-          He is ambivalent about sex: he wants to engage in sexual behaviour and calls a prostitute for this purpose, but his idealism gets the better of him. Holden actually has a very strong moral sense. He can’t go through with this because he needs to have an emotional engagement with the person he is having sex with.  Perhaps he is also aware that if he loses his virginity he crosses the line into adulthood and in fact this is something that he is fearful of. When he hears that Stradlater is going on a date with Jane, Holden is very concerned about Jane. He wants to be the ‘catcher’ and stop her from falling into the grasps of adulthood by engaging in sexual behaviour. He seems to see Stradlater as predatory in his behaviour towards women and that is something that Holden is concerned about. Jane is also a part of Holden’s childhood and perhaps he doesn’t want to see her ‘disappear’.

What his Holden’s attitude towards adulthood?

-          Holden wants to protect children from adulthood: his stereotype of adults is that they are ‘phonies’. He sees it as a time not as safe as childhood and therefore as more vulnerable, though he knows that he cannot prevent growth and change. All children are eventually going to grow up or die, hence why he might be so frightened of change and progression through life. He does not like the alternatives and what he sees in adults.

Let’s have a look at Holden at the end of the novel

-p.190-191: “The thing with kids is, if they want to grab the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it’s bad if you say anything to them.” Holden seems to be contradicting his attitude to growth and suggesting that children should be allowed to freedom choice and risk-taking.

“I got pretty soaking wet, especially my neck and my pants. My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way, but I got soaked anyway. I didn’t care, though. I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around.”

 

Tuesday's lesson notes

3. Holden’s description of his older brother as “being a prostitute”

Holden’s description of his brother	Quotes	Speaker and Page
- Means he has a high paying job - Exploiting himself to Hollywood - Holden thinks a High paying in job – its not good - You’re a sellout to Hollywood - He is selling his books, making nothing out of them	“ It killed me. Now he’s out in Hollywood, D.B, being a prostitute”	Holden, pg. 1

-          What this tells us about Holden is that he doesn’t value money or the kind of success that society recognizes

-          What Holden values is being genuine and authentic

-          Holden is very idealistic in terms of his view of the world; he wants the world to be ‘perfect’, and it is not

-          He a strong sense of morality and he really values his close relationships

-          He sets very high standards which most people don’t reach, yet he himself doesn’t reach them. Allie and Phoebe are the only who really reach Holden’s standards.

4. "Phony" – pretending to be something that they’re not

Holden appears to view all adults as “phony.”

Holden criticizes about people who are boring, insecure and people who are “phony.”

 Holden uses the label “phony” to imply that such people are superficial.

 Holden constantly points out the phoniness in others when he is often acting as a phony. This is shown throughout the novel when he lies by claiming to like or agree with statements or ideas he hates, goes out with girls he doesn’t like, all to try to feel less lonely or to avoid direct confrontations.

He later contradicts himself when he regards to himself as phony; “I'd be a phony if I let them stick me in a movie short” - Chapter 11

Holden explains to his sister Phoebe his thoughts about schools and how they are phony places and their main goal is to prepare students to become “phony” to survive in the adult world.

 He sees such “phoniness” everywhere in the adult world, and believes adults are so phony that they can’t even see their own phoniness.

 Many of the characters in the novel such as Ackley, Stradlater, Sally and Mr. Spencer are often phony, and say and do things that keep up appearances rather than reflect what they truly think and feel.

p.2 – “since 1888 we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men.”

5. Holden’s use of the red hunting hat.

Pages:

• 15
• 40
• 46
• 80
• etc

Overall:

The hat is a symbol of safety and protection, which Holden wears when he is feeling insecure or vulnerable.

Ø  To Holden the hat becomes a materialistic comforter.

Ø  The hat plays the role of a carer/ friend

Ø  Boost his self worth- by making him feel better about himself

Quotes:

“I saw it in the window of this sports store when we got out of the subway, just after I noticed id lost all the goddam foils.” page 15

Ø  He bought the hat make him feel better about himself as he didn’t mean to loose the foils.

Ø  He would have been bullied/put down because of the lost foils.

Ø  The hat was a pick me up

“I kept sitting there on the floor till I heard old Stradlater close the door and go down the corridor to the can. Then I got up. I couldn’t find my god dam hunting hat anywhere” page 39

Ø  Straight away he looked for the hat for comfort

Ø  He became depended on the hat and the feeling he got when he wore it

Ø  He relied on the hat as a friend

“my ears were nice and warm, though. That hat I bought had ear laps in it, and I put them on- I didn’t give a dam what I looked” page 47

Ø  He didn’t care about the look, or the materialistic, more so the feeling it gave him (comfort)

Ø  The hat was a form of protection   from the outside world

“I was sort of crying. I don’t know why. I put my red hunting hat on, and turned the peak around to the back, the way I liked it and then I yelled at the top of my god dam voice, ‘sleep tight, ya morons!’ ill bet I woke up every bastard on the whole floor” page 46

Ø  The first reaction was to grab the hat

Ø  The hat gave him confidence (yelling out)

Ø   

 “But it was freezing cold, and I took my red hunting hat out of my pocket and put it on- I didn’t give a god dam how I looked. I even put the ear laps down” page 80

Ø  He uses repetition of how he didn’t care about the appearance of the hat

All of this tells us that Holden sees the world as a scary place in which he needs something that he can turn to for protection.

p.191 – “I got pretty soaking wet, especially my neck and pants. My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way, but I got soaked anyway.  I didn’t care, though. I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way Old Phoebe kept going around and around.”

By the end of the book, Holden has realized that although the world may be a frightening place, it is possible to deal with this. We can’t always be protected but we can survive.

Monday's lesson notes

1. Holden’s choice to describe Allie’s baseball mitt for Stradlater’s essay and his description of his brother

·         Sadness/grief

o   We see this through Holden’s tone, turns to a more somber feeling but positive at the same time. This is one of the few occasions where we see Holden speaking positively about something or somebody.

o   “I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist…” – p. 34. Holden tells us what he did; as readers we have to deduce that he was overwhelmed with grief and sadness on this night.

·         Reminiscing on how his brother used to be a happy, intelligent kid

o   “…He was about fifty times as intelligent. He was terrifically intelligent” – p. 33

o   “But it wasn’t just that he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at people.” – p. 33

o   When we compare Holden’s very positive attitude to Allie with his very negative attitude to everybody else, we understand the strength of his grief and the power of his love for Allie.

·         Rage

o   By Holden smashing the windows, we can see that he loved his brother and he misses him

o   May create the feeling for the reader that he feels that life is unfair: why did a ‘good, intelligent’ kid like his brother have to die over someone else?-

·         Death/loss

o   Not something that should be taken lightly

o   The effect that one death can have on many different lives

o   Hurts to lose someone so important

o   Impacts on how Holden thinks and acts

 

2. Holden’s concerns about the ducks in Central Park – This is a motif, a symbol which will continue to appear throughout the novel.

- The ducks are forced to flee and Holden is trying to see what the ducks do as he is forced to flee. Page 11: “I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away.” This when he is talking to Old Spencer and his mind wonders.

-  The ducks prove that some vanishings are only temporary. Traumatized and made aware of the fragility of life by his brother Allie’s death, Holden is terrified by the idea of change and disappearance.

- The ducks vanish every winter, but they return every spring, thus symbolizing change that isn’t permanent, but cyclical. However, at this point Holden is not focused on the cyclical nature of this. He is only focused on where the ducks go when the lagoon is frozen over and they are shut out.

- The action of the ice freezing over symbolizes that Holden, at this point, also feels that he is alone, shut out from home and any other place of safety. His question about where do the ducks go suggests that Holden really wants to ask where can he go, where is his safe place.

- Finally, the pond itself becomes a minor metaphor for the world as Holden sees it, because it is “partly frozen and partly not frozen.” The pond is in transition between two states, just as Holden is in transition between childhood and adulthood. One of the reasons Holden feels locked out is because he feels incapable and unwilling to make the transition from childhood to adulthood. We see this again when Holden, on a couple of occasions, tries to cross the street. He baulks at this because he feels that if he attempts to do this, he will disappear.

- Holden returns to this idea of the ducks on a number of occasions, for example in Chapter 9, when he asks the same question of the taxi drive in NY.

- This motif of the ducks suggests that Holden’s view of the world is that it can be a place which isolates those who do not belong in the way the others do.

Week 2 Homework

Re-read Chapter 9 of The Catcher in the Rye.

Tell the story of what happens on the first two pages of this chapter, using third person narration. Use the narrative voice, and possibly the thoughts of the other characters, to reveal your feelings about Holden at this point. Position your reader to view Holden in the way you choose. Do you want readers to view him as a lonely adolescent with whom they should sympathise, as a loser and a dropout or in some other way.

Use the proof-reading and editing checklists that we have been practising, to fine tune your response before you post it to your blog for Monday's lesson.