What would make Holden Caulfield a “better” person? Or at least, not someone who flunks out of every school he goes to? What if his brother Allie had never died? What if he spent more time with his brother DB? Or his family? What if he had a dog? After all, dogs are man’s best [...]
According to Sparknotes, a major motif (“recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes”) in The Catcher In the Rye is loneliness. Holden spends a lot of his time alone, or going from one meaningless interaction to the next. While he does seem to be fairly [...]
Now that I’ve finished reading The Catcher In the Rye, and feel like I can truly contribute to the discussions we have in class, I realized that, well, I don’t want to. It’s not that it wasn’t a good book, it was, and it’s not that I just don’t want to talk about it. There’s just something [...]
I was a little mad at myself on Wednesday when we received our novel study books. The weekend before, I’d finally cracked open Blindness, by José Saramago, and although I was only about 30 or 40 pages in by then, they were much too gripping for me to put down the book and start on [...]
