Oct 28, 2009 09:15 PM
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“Anyway I keep picturing all these kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of them and no one around, I mean- except me. And I am 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 are running and they don’t look where they are going. I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”
Have you ever wanted to do something weird like this at some stage of your life? I did, I wanted to live my life collecting things, weird things like match boxes or cigarette boxes, sometimes pens or even different kinds of stones and what not, even the sticks of rockets used on Diwali night, used to wander here and there collecting them in the early morning afterwards. I would have been called a “The collector of Things“. Do you have any such vocation in your mind?
MY THOUGHT : A time comes in one’s life, mostly adolescent age, when one feels neglected or hated by all around him. Sometimes it happens the other way around, one hates almost everyone and everything around him. Life seems to be going in no direction and one begins to criticize and hate all for it, including our own self. So we try to contact and meet people, with whom, in past, we had a very good relationship and who’s company we had enjoyed a lot, but we soon get fed up with them too, in t hat time span of directionless life, and soon find ourselves hating t hem too.
Later, luckily if we do, we discover that problem is not with the world around us, but with us only and that discovery is what warns us as well as gives us strength to get back on the track, and we do get back mostly. Otherwise none of us would have been where we are now. Later on when we remember those days we laugh at ourselves. If you want to know the truth, it happens with all of us. Isn’t it?
STORY : “Catcher in the Rye” is about the same directionless period of Holden Caulfield’s (aged around 13-14 yrs) life. He has got flunked from the school, to tell you the truth he has failed in 4 out of 5 exams, and if you want to know the real truth, it’s the 4th schools he is getting flunked from. Now he has 4 days to spend before he moves to his home. If you want to know the truth he doesn’t even want to go home anymore. He just wants to move here and there, freak out, and do anything that can amuse him, but nothing seems to do much for him. No school, no teaching and move to a faraway place where no one can identify him. These 3 days weary of himself, weary of everything around he tries to contact and meet people he thinks he will feel comfortable with, but nothing like that happens, instead of that he begins to hate and criticize them too, and loses interest in meeting them too. If you want to know, the truth is, if your own life doesn’t interests you, nothing else can. So he decided to meet his little sister, Phoebe, for one last time and then move to a faraway place, where things will be different, so he thinks. But this reunion with her makes him realize how wrong he’s about it all. So that’s how Holden Caulfield’s discovers his problem for it all and that’s how his period of directionless wandering ends.
CITR is written from the viewpoint of a boy aged around 13-14 years. It is so wittily, humorously and cleverly written that you never lose interest in it, at any stage of its life of around just more than 200 pages. Even when you have finished more than half of it and you find that like Holden’s life, the story of the book also is moving nowhere. But all credit to J D Salinger for writing it so smartly. It is more than fun, its humors but also has a lesson to teach, a great lesson of our life, a lesson that we usually learn by our own experience.
But no harm in reading about that of Holden, as it will bring back glimpses of your own experience of that drifting period of your life. Though it’s the story of a loser, a moron guy, but the genius of the writer is in the fact that he has made an interesting and funny book out of the life of a lazy and aimless boy.
Choosen ones :
"Don’t tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
“The mark of a immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
“You will find that you are not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”
LAST TAKE : If you want to know the truth, this book is for all kind of readers. It is considered even today, got published first time in 1965, at number 3 among 100 best books of all time. A book like this is pleasure to read and a treasureto keep
Recommended to all, and my rating is 5.
Take Care and keep Writing
Vikky Gural
PYAR HUMEIN PHIR MILAAEGA......
