麦田里的守望者 英语读后感,论文
The Painfulne 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 discu the novel in such terms, Holden Caulfield is an unusual protagonist for a bildungsroman because his central goal is to resist the proce 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, expreing 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 (“phonine”), 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 progrees, Holden’s experiences, particularly his encounters with Mr.Antolini and Phoebe, reveal the shallowne of his conceptions.
