Sunday, April 26, 2009

I generally disagree with the notion of specific changes leading from "childhood" to "adulthood". Associating maturity and immaturity (or any other quality) to specific age groups, is simply inaccurate. Those kinds of changes are ongoing. They can occur individually at any time in a persons life, or not occur at all.

So then, I'm going to approach this question a bit differently.

One of the key ideas Holden seems to be struggling with is Purity, or rather Impurity. He perceives the vast majority of the world to be impure or corrupt, labeling people and things as phonies. This struggle is also internal, as on some level he recognizes that he is plagued by the same flaws he sees in everyone else (specifically when he spends several paragraphs describing the way he sometimes thinks about doing crumby things with a girl).

In some senses Holden's ideation is extremely mature, he recognizes the differences between love and lust and realizes that the former is preferable for its authenticity. The overwhelming orientation of society however, and even a part of himself, is directed the other way - and Holden will continue to struggle until he comes to terms with his own humanity in this sense.

5 comments:

  1. love/lust, the former is more authentic..... in a completely non-sexual way..

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  2. A different way to look at this, but it is very logical and makes plenty of sense. I agree with you to some extent, that you can't put specific qualities with age groups; that you can't really judge someone based on an age group. And you're right about Holden judging impurity and purity, judging everyone elses impurities. He takes repsonsiblity for his own, or at least is concious of those descisions. Very good!

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  3. What about the parts you disagree with?
    (I've got this novel -I'm responding to comments!!!- feeling XD. If only this was my real blog.

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  4. i also agree with the age group thing but you need to admit that most of the time the change takes place in the tennage years. Just to generalize.

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  5. That's like making generalizations by race. You can't do it. On this I am immobile.

    Actually a lot of times it doesn't occur at all. That's one reason our prison's are full

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