Legal Law admin  

Watch the characters grow up: the one who catches in the rye and slays a nightingale

For most of us, reading “The Catcher in the Rye” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” stands out as a highlight of the enlightened high school experience. This is not Charles Dickens; Both stories are told by young protagonists in everyday speech and are full of youthful ideas, meaning that adulthood sucks. Holden Caulfield and Scout Finch are two boys looking down the path that connects childhood and adulthood, only from opposite ends of the journey. Both are full of contradictions, both defy the gender stereotypes of their time, and both make the rest of us think, I’m glad I’m not the only one!

Holden is a seventeen-year-old gray-haired boy who effortlessly switches between trying to “practice a little” with a prostitute (you know, in case he “gets married or something”) and “reeling” pretending to be shot by Hollywood. thugs-style. Suffice it to say, you have yet to find a balance between becoming a man and playing cops and robbers. Of course, the fact that Holden despises most adults and heroically worships his dead younger brother doesn’t help much in the transition either.

Holden is the type of guy you alternately want to befriend and punch him in the face. Let’s face it: while your observations about the adult world are often spot on, your level of self-awareness is somewhat lacking. “People always think something is true.” Always, Holden? Or what about the fact that he hates all things “fake” but is proud to be “the most terrible liar you’ve ever seen in your life”? On the other hand, we can’t help but love the image of Holden in his preppy clothes and red hunting hat that eradicates the f-word from his little sister’s school in a truly righteous way. Holden may be a half-mad, self-deceived liar, but he has decency where decency counts.

At times, in fact, she sounds radically feminist, arguing that because sex requires objectification, a man shouldn’t want to “get sexy” with a woman he cares about. He even admits that the main reason he’s still a virgin is because a girl tells him to stop, he actually does. Gasp! Well, nowadays this is not something you should be awarded any awards for, but remember that the story * is * set in the 1950s. We challenged the other characters in Catcher in the Rye to show half the moral fortitude.

Speaking of moral toughness, although Scout is 6 years old at the beginning of To Kill a Mockingbird and at a much more carefree time in her life than Holden, her upbringing in segregated Alabama from 1930 has quite a dramatic effect on her learning curve. When her lawyer father wholeheartedly but unsuccessfully defends a black cripple in court for a crime he obviously did not commit, Scout discovers that, contrary to what most 6-year-olds are told, personal morality, social ethics, and law are not all members of the same happy family. Hell, they don’t even live in the same part of town.

However, that is not to say that Scout has her own perfectly calibrated moral compass. She imagines the local confinement for a potential predator, killer, and creature from the Black Lagoon despite his repeated gestures of kindness; You cannot conceive of the fact that your black housekeeper has a life, a family, and a community that extend beyond simply caring for white children; he can’t bear to have the kids on the playground call his dad “black lover”; It does not bother him to see his father’s defendant mistreat him because he is “just a black man.” As much as we prefer Scout over the other characters in To Kill a Mockingbird, we can’t help but cringe when we see adult biases and childhood gullibility put sleepovers on her brain.

Between witnessing her neighbors turn against her family, watching her father lose a winning case, hearing about the defendant’s subsequent murder, being attacked by a drunken fan and, oh yeah, befriending the neighborhood psycho, Scout loses alone. a hint of his innocence; However, with his father’s guidance, he manages to bring in some maturity as he does so. This process is aided by the fact that Scout adores, emulates, and even dresses like her father and older brother. In fact, what Holden has in female sensibilities, Scout more than makes up for in a female fight: she spits, curses, fights, and can fully defend herself among her older brother’s friends. This combination of innate spirit and parental direction gives us hope for an adult Scout that we never felt for Holden. Actually, we would be very curious to see what kind of direction Holden’s parents took. Where are Holden’s parents, anyway?

Leave A Comment