Throughout this book, there are many passages that reference Christianity verse free will. The first time I read this quote, I thought that Billy hung it up on his wall as a reminder that God is always there. All you need to do is pray to him in times of need and he’ll be there for you. But, as I continued to read the book I realized I was wrong. In my opinion, its there to remind Billy that he is living his predetermined destiny. And no matter what he does, nothing not even prayer can change his past or future actions. An example of this later on in the book happens while Billy is in Dresden. Before the raid, the soldiers would participate in mass because they believed that it would save them. But unfortunately, the majority of them would
“Inside every cynic is a disappointed idealist.” This quote by George Carlin perfectly outlines the reasons why many people are bitter toward the world in their everyday lives. While cynicism is justified for those who have had a tough life, countless people become exceedingly pessimistic because life didn’t meet their expectations.. An example of this would be Holden Caulfield from J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye”. Salinger does an admirable job of portraying how Holden’s attitude leads to a massive downward spiral. When a person holds too high of standards for the world around them, it can lead to an unrelenting undue criticism of people around them and even hypocrisy.
to it because his fate did not lead him there. Billy applied the fact that he had to accept
“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” J.D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is about a teenage boy struggling to get through the emotional ups and downs of life. He leaves readers with this quote at the very end of the book as a warning. He says this to prevent everyone from experiencing the lack of emotional support he felt for so long. Holden Caulfield feels as though sharing details from his life with others opens up the possibility of emotional endangerment and depression leading to self alienation to protect himself from being disappointed and heartbroken when the bond is broken.
Billy proves throughout the book that he is not mentally stable, yet somehow, he is persuasive in his interpretation of the truth.
Published in 1951, J. D. Salinger's debut novel, The Catcher in the Rye, was one of the most controversial novels of its time. The book received many criticisms, good and bad. While Smith felt the book should be "read more than once" (13), Goodman said the "book is disappointing" (21). All eight of the critics had both good and bad impressions of the work. Overall, the book did not reflect Salinger's ability due to the excessive vulgarity used and the monotony that Holden imposed upon the reader.
Vonnegut states that “Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of
The main event that leads Billy to all his confusion is the time he spent in Dresden and witnessed the fire-bombings that constantly pop in his head along with pictures of all the innocent people Billy saw that fled to Dresden the "safe spot" from the war before the bombing. When Billy sees the faces of the innocent children it represents his fear of the situation. Billy can't acknowledge the fact that they were innocent and they were killed by Americans, Americans soldiers just like himself. The biggest issue Billy cannot come to grasp with is why the bombings took place. That question has no answer; it's just something that happened that Billy couldn't get over. During all Billy's travels back to Dresden he couldn't change what had really happened there although that was the closure he was looking for. Dresden purely represents Bill's past and fears of the truth about what happened.
Billy is used to showing that everything happens because of fate. As a prisoner, Billy has no control over his day to day life. While Billy is in Dresden, the city is bombed, because of luck, only Billy and a few others survive the bombing in a slaughterhouse. The people of Tralfamadore tell Billy that humans do not understand time because everything they do is in singular progression.
“Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to man.” (Thomas Carlyle). In the story Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger, this coming of age book tells of the teen troubles experienced by the main character Holden Caulfield. After Holden gets expelled from his school Pencey Prep, Holden leaves school a couple days early to explore New York City. In his travels he experiences isolation from friends at school, feeling disconnected from his family, as he tries understand these periods angst he finds some peace.
In the novel, Kurt Vonnegut proposes the question of whether free will exist or not. The Tralfamadorians live with the idea of the fourth dimension. The fourth dimension contains occurring and reoccurring events, considering that they believe all moments have already passed. According to the Tralfamadorians, there is only free will on Earth, considering humans only think of time as a linear progression. Billy regresses back to events as a child, and remembers when his father let him sink to the bottom of the pool where he prefers to be, but he was rescued. As a young adult, Billy was drafted into the war against his free will. Even as a soldier in the war, Billy is not taken solemnly by the other soldiers. Billy comes to the conclusion that even if he trained hard, and became a good soldier he’d still die like the other soldiers in Dresden who are much better than him. Billy’s real world on earth seems to be taken into bits and pieces into the Tralfamadorian world where Billy thinks is error free. Although the serenity prayer is directed towards God, Billy directs it towards the Tralfamadorians instead. This prayer is significant to this theme, because Billy is trying to live up to the standards of the Tralfamadorians, which is nearly impossible and
From the novel, The Catcher in the Rye, the youthful protagonist Holden Caufield, employs the word “phony” to describe the behavior of a number of characters including Mr. Spencer and Ossenburger, however it is not them who are“phony”, it is the young main character. First, Mr. Spencer, Holden’s ex- history teacher, is not described as phony, but according to the adolescent, his choice of words are. Secondly, according to our main character, Ossenburger is not the generous philanthropist he portrays himself to be, but rather a greedy undertaker. Lastly, the protagonist could quite possibly be the authentic phony. All in all, the main character’s use to describe many other characters in the book is with the single word phony, when in fact the word phony would be the most probable word to describe the lead character.
Some people feel all alone in this world, with no direction to follow but their empty loneliness. The Catcher in the Rye written by J.D Salinger, follows a sixteen-year-old boy, Holden Caulfield, who despises society and calls everyone a “phony.” Holden can be seen as a delinquent who smokes tobacco, drinks alcohol, and gets expelled from a prestigious boarding school. This coming-of-age book follows the themes of isolation, innocence, and corrupted maturity which is influenced from the author's life and modernism, and is shown through the setting, symbolism, and diction.
In the movie, The Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, the main antagonist, Ego the Living Planet, wanted to destroy life across the universe after searching for life and then being disappointed with what he found. He felt that alien life had no meaning and thought it would be better off being eradicated. Eventually, he is shown the error of his beliefs from his son, Star-Lord, and tells him that life is about accepting people for who they are. Three people that also share this belief, except wanting to kill all life, are Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, Christopher McCandless from the biography film Into the Wild, and myself from my life. One quote from The Catcher in the Rye that describes all these people is from Mr. Antolini when he tells Holden, “Among other
record. Holden buys this record for Phoebe as a gift, but drops it and breaks it while he is drunk.
1.) Allusion is utilized in this quote to show a reference to the popular 1850s novel by Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, where the title character's melancholy journey starts at birth.