Blog 36

Finally I am blogging about something other than the Joad family and the things of Grapes of Wrath!! Catcher and the Rye was actually another decent book. There are quite a few different possibilities for what the themes of the book The Catcher in the Rye could be. However, in my opinion I think that the main theme is that growing up is actually hard. It is a lot harder than it looks. In the book Holden finds himself all alone on the busy dirty streets of New York. Holden thought that growing up would be easy and that he is grown up and mature and could just take care of himself. That is definitley not the case. Holden is a bad kid. He has done some bad things and is headed no where, fast. He needs to make a change and decide where he wants his life to go. Holden is a sixteen year old boy who has been expelled from not one, not two, not three, but four schools. Being expelled from four different schools is not showing a good life for Holden. It just is not a very promising situation. Holden needs to find something to make him go somwhere, he needs to get ahold of himself, have an inner drive that is going to make him not only want to succeed, but to physically succeed. He needs to do this on his own. Nobody can make him want to change. He needs to want to change. If he does not do this and stays on the track he is on now, then his life is going absolutley no where. He will not have a future if he does nto straighten his life out. Personally I think that HOlden seems scared of being an adult. He tries and resists being mature. I think he is just scared. Instead of taking maturity seriously he just makes it a joke. He says when you become an adult, you are just a phony(Salinger 39). He labels all adults "phonies". Personally I think he is just jealous because they have something going for them. He is just scared to be something successful because he has never done anything but be bad and fail.



Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown and, 1991. Print.