麦田里的守望者中英读后感

The Painfulness of Growing Up

According to most analyses, The Catcher in the Rye 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 Caulfield 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. But he refuses to acknowledge this fear, expressing it only in a few

instances—for example, when he talks about sex and admits that “[s]ex is something I just don t understand. I swear to God I don t” (Chapter 9).

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 reveals his image of these two worlds better than his fantasy about the catcher in the rye: he imagines childhood as an idyllic field of rye in which children romp and play; adulthood, for the children of this world, is equivalent to death—a fatal fall over the edge of a cliff. His 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.

In the novel, The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, the main character Holden Caulfield has many different kinds of relationship with different people. Some of them are very important for Holden s life because he likes and

admires them; Holden also hates some of the people he has relationship with. Everyone who has a relationship with Holden affects him which shows

Holden s personality. The novel uses Holden s relationship with his siblings Phoebe, D.B., and Allie to show different parts of Holden s character.

Phoebe is Holden s 10-year-old sister. The relationship between Phoebe and Holden shows Holden likes children and his role as a protector of innocence. Holden loves Phoebe very much. In the novel, Phoebe represents all of the not phony things in the world, and also children s innocence. Holden goes to see Phoebe at late one night in D.B. s room and explains to her his dream job: I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody s around-nobody big, I

mean-expect me. And I m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff- I mean if they re running and they don t look where they re going I have to come out