10届 文学方向 Longing for Nature in Rebellion.doc

Longing for Nature in Rebellion Holdens Spiritual Odyssey in the Catcher in the RyeIntroductionThe first-person narrative follows Holden Caulfields experiences in New York City in the days following his expulsion from Pencey Prep, a fictional college preparatory school in the fictional city of Agerstown, Pennsylvania.Although only 16, he is taller than the ordinary people. He is wearing a cap and a trench coat all day long, wandering around the city and is reluctant to study. He thoroughly disgusts school which includes teachers, students, homework, game, etc. Whats worse, he has been expelled from school for three times. At the end of this semester, he is expelled from school again for four out of five lessons fail. He doesnt feel depressed. He left school to New York City at night after fighting with his roommate, but he dared go home immediately. Late in the evening he checks into the dilapidated Edmont Hotel. There, he spends an evening dancing with three tourist girls and has a clumsy encounter with a prostitute; he refuses to do anything with her and tells her to leave, although he pays her for her time. She demands more money than was originally agreed upon and when Holden refuses to pay he is struck by her pimp.The next day is Sunday Holden donates 10 dollars to two sisters while he is wandering on the street. Later he goes to see a play with his girlfriend Sally. When he sees the fake face of Sally, he is very unpleasant and quarrels with her. Holden then goes to the bar and gets drunk. He walks into the toilet, washes his head with cool water, only to get wake up. However, out of the bars, it is freezing cold. He thinks he may be suffering from pneumonia and died, therefore, he will never meet his sister Phoebe, so he decides to go back home and say goodbye to Phoebe.Holden secretly returns home, fortunately parents have been outside. He wakes up Phoebe and tells her that he wants to be a catcher in the rye: Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobodys around-nobody big, I mean-except me. And Im 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 theyre running and they dont look where theyre going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. Thats all Id do all day. Id just be the catcher in the rye and all. Later, his parents come back, Holden is scared and hid in the closet. After his parents going to the bedroom, he hurriedly slips out of the apartment to a respected teachers house. But at midnight, he finds that the teacher may be a gay, so he has to secretly sneak away to the waiting room of the station.Holden neither want to go home, nor go to school, thus he determines to move to the west to make a living where he can pretends to be a deaf and dumb person, however, he is willing meet Phoebe before leaving, so he brings a note to her asking if she could meet him in front of the gate of the Museum of Art. After the scheduled appointment time, Phoebe has finally come, but dragging a large box which is filled with her clothes, she has resolved to go west with him. Finally, because Holden fails to persuade Phoebe, he has to abandon the travel to the west, and takes her to a zoo and parks to play for a while, and then goes home. Shortly after Holden returns home, he gets a serious illness. The whole thesis is written on the basis of Freudian theory. In the eyes of Freud, human beings are oppressed by the society, then, they oppress their wishes in the subconscious mind. The instinct of death can help us understand the tendency of suicide. It can be explained through wish-satisfaction theory to prove Holdens desire which is to become a catcher in the rye. Freud believes the unconscious wishes are active, they are ready to show their desire from unconscious mind to conscious mind as long as there is an opportunity. The growth of Holden can be explained by sublimation theory. Freud thinks human beings can control and guide instinct to step close to socialize and meaningful target. That is to say, sublimation can make human instinct into noble goals. In short, the theory can help us know about the mental activities and motives of Holden.13张悦：Longing for Nature in RebellionHoldens Spiritual Odyssey in the Catcher in the RyeChapter One The Author and Background1.1 A Brief Account of the AuthorJ D Salinger was born on January 1, 1919 in New York who lived in a rich Jewish businessmans family. In 1942, Salinger joined the army, then in 1944, he went to the battlefield of Europe to engage in the work of anti-spy.After Salinger retired in 1946, he returned to New York to starte to concentrate on writing. His first novel ,Catcher in the Rye, received a great deal of success as soon as it was published in 1951, it became famous shortly after that. The book which has shaped a image of lost hero in contemporary literature of America talks in the tone of a 16-year-old student Holden who comes from a middle-class family of the United States. When the book was published, it was popular around the world, which elicited strong agreement among young people, the hero Holden has also become the representative of the Beat Generation of the United States after the war.After the success of Catcher in the Rye , Salinger became more withdrawn. He bought more than 90 acres land in a countryside of New Hampshire near the river, , and then built a cabin on the top of the hill. Although he never gave up writing, he rarely published his own works after1951.1.2 Background InformationThe United States made a fortune in the war, the material production developed rapidly in the post-war period which led to the rising number of people of middle-class.But at the same time the majority of peoples spiritual life became increasingly poor. Emptiness. The U.S. government pursued McCarthyism and Truman Doctrine in early 1950s in order to contain communism, and the international community intensified the cold war,moreover the government supressed the progressive forces, when people were under the horror of nuclear weapon. Some people disguised the horrible atmosphere with peace and lived in gloomy days; the others digusted vulgar and hypocritical morals, therefore they wanted to resist, but they were lack of a glorious ideal and could not find a brighter way. Therefore, some contemporary historians of the United States in the 1950s called the United States the silent fifties or cowardly fifties.Some young people adaopted a negative way (mainly through alcohol, drugs, gregarious parasitism and so on) to resist the realities who the historian called the Beat Generation or Beat elements. The author JD Salinger, and his hero Holden Caufield are actually the representatives of the “Beat Elements”, but their degradation are not as far as having drugs, such as Holden still wants to explore and pursue the ideals (including the ideal of love), so he is longing for the Oriental philosophy and then proposes to be a catcher in the rye in the future.张悦：Longing for Nature in Rebellion Holdens Spiritual Odyssey in the Catcher in the RyeChapter Two Growing Pains-Holdens CrisisThe period of the creation of Catcher in the Rye is between World War II and the early 50s of the 20th century. After World War II, the United States Youth Generally produced a sense of disillusionment for human civilization. The destruction of the war had gone beyond humans ability to control; the cold war in 50s and McCarthyism had destroyed peoples basic living atmosphere of mutual understanding and trust so that people suffered fear and loneliness, but this novel was written in the way of autobiography to show teenager Holdens anxious and lonely process of growing pains. The following article will analyze the different aspects of young peoples growing pains.2.1 Lack of Care“I didnt want to go home or anything till they got it and thoroughly digested it and all. I didnt want to be around when they first got it. My mother gets very hysterical.” “He wrote this terrific book of short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him. The best one in it was The Secret Goldfish. It was about this little kid that wouldnt let anybody look at his goldfish because hed bought it with his own money. It killed me. Now hes out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute.”First of all, Holden lacks of care of family. His father was a successful lawyer, who gives Holden little care in addition to money and material things. What he trains children is simply rudeness. His mother has not recovered from the death of her little son Allie and does not care about him either. As for his older brother DB, when DB was an ordinary writer, he liked DBs works and spoke highly of his novel The Secret Goldfish. However, in order to make more money, DB starts to write vulgar scripts for Hollywood and get involved into the secular society, and DBs image is completely destroyed. Thus his parents and brother dont understand his depression of adult world due to secularization due, and he is also unwilling even disdain to communicate with them. In addition, Allie who he likes the most was died of sickness, only his 10-year-old sister Phoebe understands him, yet she cannot really make sense of his melancholy because of her young age .Secondly, the elders from whom he has not received the guidance of life. After he was expelled from Pansy, he bids farewell to his old and kind-hearted history teacher Spencer but Mr. Spencer doesnt listen to him carefully, even scolds him, while at this time Holden is thinking about something else, thus we can see two of them dont have totally spiritual communication. “Old Spencer asked me something then, but I didnt hear him. I was thinking about old Haas.”2.2 Confusion for Adult World“One of the biggest reasons I left Elkton Hills was because I was surrounded by phonies. Thats all.”In contrast, Holden is an unusual in Bildungsroman, because he aims at resisting becoming mature. He not only does not admit the adult world make him fearful, but also thinks the adult world is a superficial and phony society, while childrens world is naive, curious and honest. In his fantasy of these two worlds, what can best express his idea is the catcher in the rye, he imagines childhood as an idyllic rye, where kids can play, while the adulthood means death - falling off the cliff. Therefore when his sister Phoebe asks him if he is willing to do something in the future, he said he wants to be a catcher in the rye, his job is to stand on the edge of the crazy cliff, and catch the children running toward the cliff in order not to fall off the cliff.In addition, he says that all adults are hypocrisy without exception, what more disappointing is the experience of three days journey in New York City where he saw the ugly and disgusting scenes of human farce though the whole novel. For instance, he saw an abnormal man wearing womens dress; then he saw a man and a woman spray the water and wine to each others face with dissolute smile across the room, they were frivolous and coy, which made Holden feel nausea and surprised, so that he thought he was the only normal person in the world. “I saw a man and a woman squirting water out of their mouths at each other.” Moreover, even the admirable history teacher Spencer are hypocritical, for example, when Holden goes to visit him after being expelled from school, he says to Holden: Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules. .The adult world which is materialistic, artificial and money-oriented makes Holden feel at loose ends, but he has no option. On one hand, he is attracted by tobacco, alcohol, sex and the thing like independence of the adult world; on the other hand, he is not willing to lose the innocence of the childhood. Thus, Holdens inner struggle and suffering of growth are expressed to readers.2.3 Anxiety for GrowthIt indicates the weirdness of Holden at the beginning of The Catcher in the Rye: “Im not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. Ill just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas.” His madness shows his curse for growth, in his view, the resistance and discontent for modern society are more natural and direct than obedience. He does not want to growing up, because adults are phony and stupid, only children have the sincereness from heart, frank truth and the good side of human nature. The purity of children is from instinct, but adults are more complex and calculated. This lingering nostalgia for childrens purity rather than growing up becoming a part of Holdens anxiety during the process of growth. Anxiety is a state which individuals produce fearness for unpleasure. Unlike hunger and thirst which will soon be over, anxiety might have influence on body for a long time. Freud has made a deep study of anxiety, and divides it into three types. First, the anxiety for the reality can be called fear, and second is moral anxiety, such as the fear of punishment of conscience, third, neuroticism anxiety which comes from Latin word, means nervous, thus it is also known as tense anxiety, it will make people feel irrational and out of control. Holdens anxiety is reality anxiety. Freud said in the Introduction to Psychoanalysis that fear is the highest form of anxiety. Anxiety is a state instead of any specific stuff, while fear is the scare for the specific stuff. Holdens fear and psychological depression come from the lost of childhoods love and the death of his brother Allie.江西理工大学应用科学学院毕业设计Chapter Three The Process of Holdens Searching and Persuing for PurityIn the view of reflectionism, Holden has been on a journey of finding for innocence. He is contradicted in the inner heart; therefore he has to run out of school to the society but finally compromise to the society. Holden tried to find innocence at school and New York, but in the end, he has fond innocence only in childrens world. Under the background of the economy and ideology of the United States converted from production-oriented to consumer-oriented, this novel has exposed the spiritual world of the American youth represented by Holden.3.1 Holdens desire for purityHolden is a smart, sensitive and imaginative teenager who grows up in the privileged circumstances, and his future seems to have been arranged by their parents: to become an excellent lawyer like his father. However, he is fraught with confusion for the future, he averse the hypocrisy and ruthless of the adult world, and thirst for the sincere relationship among people. In Holdens mind, the world is divided into two categories: one is the dirty real world, the other is a world full of pure and innocence. This is the two poles of his heart, he lingered between them and hold different attitude toward them.After World War II the United States appeared unprecedented economic prosperity and living standard had been risen and at the same time the number of middle class is increasing. However, with the spread of the material life , the spiritual life of Americans has become increasingly poor, the change of the U.S. economy which converted from production-oriented to consumer-oriented has influenced the ideology of the U.S. A high degree of material comforts had torpified people and made them lack of subjective initiative and revolutionary, they were exhausting in the pursuit of material enjoyment so as to have no time to take account of their spiritual life, and gradually lost their identity. Some of the people were disatisfied with the corrupt society, but they were insufficient of ideals and courages , so they remained silent and adopted passive resistance. The youth during this period has been known as the Beat Generation, Holden is just the representative of this period. He is cynical and rebellious on the surface, but he is as virtuous as an angel inside. The contradictions of Holden is only because he could not understand the hypocrisy and degradation of society, but he is trapped in it and can not escape , as a result, he could only make a compromise with the real world. Holdens inner heart desires for pure, so he has been looking for genuine and kindness at school, in New York and Childrens World.3.2 Pursuit of purityHolden studys at Pencey Prep in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. As one of the students of Pencey, Holden feels he is surrounded by a crowed of “phony people”, there is irreconcilable opposition between the surroundings and him. It has described a depressed picture at the beginning of the novel: on a Saturday afternoon, when all of the people are down at the football game, while Holden is standing up on the hill, while before that he was ostracized by the whole fencing team, because he has left all the foils and equipment and stuff on the subway. What is worse, he is expelled from school because of failure of four courses. Holden holds hostile attitude toward school, teachers and students. He complains: “It was a terrible school, no matter how you looked张悦：Longing for Nature in RebellionCharacter Analysis of Holden Caulfieldat it.” “They dont do any damn more molding at Pencey than they do at any other school. And I didnt know anybody there that was splendid and clear-thinking and all.”Schools are the key institutions which consciously steer young people into adult society. Therefore, Holdens relationship with school becomes a microcosm of the relationship between individual and social relations. The United States after World War II was a weak and self-satisfied country, as well as endless period of materialism. The loudest voice in this country was personal greed hum. It was a lazy persons age. Therefore