Crazy Eddie

In this obituary, Guttridge presents a recount of Salinger’s life and educational background. Salinger attended Pennsylvania’s Valley Forge Military Academy, where he wrote for the school’s literary magazines and acted in its plays. After an abortive stint at Ursinus University, Salinger took a short story writing class at Columbia before being drafted into World War II. Salinger struggled through mental health issues upon his return from combat, using Hinduism and Zen Buddhism’s emphasis on the…

Through the iconic voice of Holden Caulfield, an estranged adolescent, one hears a cry for help emerge from the clouds of depression so effortlessly that nearly everyone, regardless of background, relates. As evident within J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and particularly during chapter 20, Salinger utilizes casual diction, relatable syntax, and a symbolic setting to convey Holden’s great dejection and introspection about death itself. With such a strong rhetorical technique as this,…

Writing-in-Role: Holden Caulfield (the Catcher in the Rye) Selma Thurmer was Pencey’s headmaster’s daughter and seemed to possess interesting personality attributes, so I’ve decided to write about the scene where Holden talks to her on a bus in the beginning chapter of the Catcher in the Rye. Inserting scene in page three, chapter one, first paragraph: I sat next to her once in the bus from Agerstown and we sort of struck up a conversation... Personally, I wasn’t really in the mood to…

In The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger the main character, Holden Caufield, struggles with many problems which, after being deconstructed, all centralize around a feeling of fear. These problems include his insecurities, his loneliness, and his fear of the adult world and growing up. Holden’s actions and feelings throughout the book can be further understood by being analyzed using a deconstructionist criticism. A deconstructionist criticism uses an investigative look at details found in a…

“I’m interested in how innocence fares when it collides with hard reality,” (Geoffrey Fletcher). This concept of innocence versus the reality of society is a timelessly relevant conflict present both in literature and in life. It is one of many themes in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. The character that explores this theme is the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, who fights to protect those he believes to be innocent. As an adolescent himself, he periodically tries conformity, but…

actually very negative and he acts as if he has no faith in him ever having a future. His emotions very quickly lessen throughout this tiring story. After Holden finishes his story, you feel as though you just came off a roller coaster of emotions and crazy events (Tolchin). Holden starts his story by telling us about why…

When individuals develop their sense of self, they must also develop a sense of compassion and morality in order to strive for the betterment of society. In a world with corruption and chaos, to maintain humanity and kindness, individuals might prevent the loss of their childhood innocence. Born with compassion, people tend to act more kind in the years of their youth; however, as individuals age, expectations, judgements, and corruption haunts and creates obstacles in their lives. In Charles…

The study of literary merit appeared to be a study of questions. Finding answers to these questions as a senior in high school seemed challenging and maybe just a bit too ambitious. I was pulled down a rabbit hole. The swirling mass of ideas, questions, and conclusions continually contorting and transforming themselves into the most dizzying of arrays. After I found my footing at the bottom of the hole I looked around and saw that what had pulled me down was what I saw at the bottom, questions.…

The theme of alienation is depicted through the main character Holden Caulfield, in the novel The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. Jerome David Salinger was born on January 1, 1919 (Wenke). Salinger pursued his dream of becoming a writer by graduating from Columbia University (“Catcher”). The Catcher in the Rye is the representation of Salinger’s childhood and adolescence, which he claimed “...in a 1953 interview with Shirley Blahly… ‘his boyhood was very much the same as [Holden…

a body catch a body,'" I said. "Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And 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…