Official Catcher in the Rye Discussion Thread

[John Green]

In which we shall discuss such topics as:

1. Holden's feeling of alienation and outsiderness.
2. The book's attitudes toward women (or is it Holden's attitude toward women?)
3. The manner in which Holden's loneliness is expressed.
4. The difficulty of moving from the world of innocence to the world of experience.
5. Anything else.

Thanks for being awesome, nerdfighters.

[thedragonfruitking]

we doing the 10 word majig


"depressing kid is depressing, being depressed really sucks ass"

there's mine

[Webz]

I really don't think it's possible to respond to Catcher in 10 words.

[Christina Marie Phillips]

Another interpretation of the metaphor could be that it doesn't matter if you are a fish or a duck. God is going to take care of you even if you don't see a way through the winter of growing up.

Holden's question regards the cycle of life. The fish freeze and then come back. He isn't sure what happens to the ducks, but he DOES know that they come back. This conflicts with his feelings about Allie's death, because Holden knows that Allie won't come back like the ducks do. Holden does not realize that where the ducks go is not important, what is important is that the ducks come back and will keep coming back until there is no place for them.

This also ties into Holden's false belief in the image that growing up is like falling off a cliff at the edge of the field of rye. It is like dying. To Holden, becoming an adult means becoming a phony, and to lose that childlike innocence is to become something of a fallen angel. Because he has never really had a real positive adult role model in his life (the people he looks up to are children: Allie and Phoebe, though ironically, Phoebe is more mature than the vast majority of adults), Holden has lost faith in the idea of successful and meaningful adulthood. Thus, the question "where do the ducks go?" reveals Holden's disbelief that when the ice is frozen over in winter (people grow up) the ducks survive and come back the next spring (children become adults of character).

It also reveals his confusion between the painful, abrupt, senseless death of Allie, which defies the existence of a loving God that would take care of the ducks in winter and bring them back in the spring. Holden cannot connect Allie's death into the seamless, guided circle of life he sees in the ducks.

Yay for ducks and fishies!