The Catcher in the Rye Question 6

            I finally have twenty blogs done! Yipee! Sadly, I still have thirty more to write. I will get through it; I know I can do it!  I always ask myself, “Why do we still read this book today?”  That is going to be what this blog is about. 

            I believe that we still read this book because our teachers like the message and they have all the materials on it.  It is easy to reuse materials than having to buy all new.  Its like at the end of the school year and you barely used your markers, which you want to just throw away to get rid of.  You should just bring them home and reuse them next year that way you do not have to buy all new! Plus it is cheaper.  Let us get back to the novel.

            After I finished reading The Catcher in the Rye, I felt like that I learned something.  Its message and characters spoke to me.  Holden just did not know what to do.  His life was not going easy on him.  He failed out of four schools and his younger brother, Allie died.  Imagine that being put on your shoulders.  I would want to give up, but you cannot.  Holden started giving up but every time he thought of his younger sister, Phoebe, his spirits lifted.  Phoebe is what kept him grounded.  Everyone in life should have that one person to keep you happy and in touch with reality.  In the second to last chapter, I found the best passage throughout the whole novel.  “I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around.  I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth.  I don’t know why.  It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all.  God, I wish you could’ve been there” (Salinger 213).  Besides using damn so many times, I loved this quote.  Just to know how happy Holden was after all that he had been through was a good feeling. 

 

Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. Print.