The Catcher in the Rye Blog 1

In the first part of The Catcher in the Rye the main character, Holden Caulfield, narrates the story and starts out talking about how he got kicked out of Pencey Prep. He explains how he has kicked out of many different schools because he doesn't care about his education. He makes it sound like it's the school that is awful and not his lack of trying: "They don't do any damn more molding at Pencey than they do at any other school. And I didn't know anybody there that was splendid and clear thinking and all." Holden seems very negative about everything and he doesn't care about anything, either. Holden talks about visiting his history teacher Mr. Spencer and how he had to listen to Mr. Spencer talk about why he was failing Holden: "I flunked you in history because you knew absolutely nothing." And while Mr. Spencer keeps repeating why Holden failed, Holden is perfectly polite and agrees with everything he says, while in his head he is getting pissed off and wants to leave already. I thought this part was pretty funny because Holden decided to be nice and visit his sick teacher for the last time and his teacher makes him miserable by criticizing him the whole time.

Holden also talks about a kid named Ackley who always bothers Holden and supposedly hates everyone: "He hated Stradlater's guts and he never came in the room if Stradlater was around. He hated everybody's guts, damn near." It's pretty funny that Holden basically tells Ackley to go away, but he never gets the hint. Holden can't seem to get away even when he make a big effort to. Then Holden's roommate Stradlater comes in and asks Holden if he can borrow his coat and asks if Holden can write a paper for him. It's pretty ironic that Stradlater asks the kid that is failing almost all of his classes to write a paper for him. It's even more ironic that Holden agrees to do it. So Holden decides to write the descriptive paper about his brother Allie's baseball glove, which had poems written all over it. His brother died of leukemia and this seems to me like the only thing so far that Holden talks about without resentment and talks about his brother with compassion: "He was terrifically intelligent. His teachers were always writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allie in their class." It seems like Holden really cared about his brother and was devastated when he died because he broke all the windows with his hand: "I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it."

After reading so far I think this is a pretty funny book and I'm not even sure that was the author's intention. Just the irony and the swearing is just funny. I know this was a pretty controversial book back in the day and I can see why: there is a swear word on almost every page. Compared to books today, however, this is nothing. I also notice that when Holden is talking about something, he rambles on about something else entirely different or explains why something happened and has to constantly return back to what he was originally talking about. I can't wait to see what happens next in Holden's interesting life.