Thought After Reading The Catcher in the Rye 英语毕业论文.doc

Thought After Reading The Catcher in the Rye INTRODUCTION The Catcher in the Rye is a full-length novel wrote by Salinger J.D who has published several short stories. Though the book is not long, it has a large influence on American society and the literature world. Once the book was published, it was highly popular with American teenagers in that they thought this book told out their inner thinking and it immediately became a hot fashion for students of both middle and high schools to follow the hero of the book---Holden. They were reversible and red hunting hats with the peaks pulled around to the back and they spoke Holden-style language. More over, in the 60s, once American scholars discussed literature with American teenagers, in was impossible for them not to mention it. According to most analyses, it is a bildungsroman, a novel about a young character’s growth into maturity. While it is appropriate to discuss the novel in such terms, Holden is an unusual protagonist for a bildungsroman because his central goal is to resist the process of maturity itself. As his thoughts about the Museum of Natural History demonstrate, Holden fears change and is overwhelmed by complexity. He wants everything to be easily understandable and eternally fixed, like the statues of Eskimos and Indians in the museum. He is frightened because he is guilty of the sins he criticizes in others, and because he can’t understand everything around him. He created understandings of childhood and adulthood allow Holden to cut himself off from the world by covering himself with a protective armor of cynicism. But as the book progresses, Holden’s experiences, particularly his encounters with Mr. Antolini and Phoebe, reveal the shallowness of his conceptions. Instead of acknowledging that adulthood scares and mystifies him, Holden invents a fantasy that adulthood is a world of superficiality and hypocrisy (“phoniness”), while childhood is a world of innocence, curiosity, and honesty. Nothing