Bird in the House and The Catcher in the Rye Essay

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Bird in the House and the Catcher in the Rye

Both J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye and Margaret Laurence's collection of interrelated stories A Bird in the House highlight the struggles of the main characters as they come of age in unforgiving times with largely unsympathetic families, but the ways in which either character deals with these issues differ greatly, and comparing the two will help to reveal the particular statements each narrative makes about growing up and coming of age.

Holden Caulfield, the central character of The Catcher in the Rye, does not deal with his journey into adulthood well, not least of all because more than anything he desires to keep others from having to leave their childhood behind, and wants to become the titular catcher in the rye, catching children before they fall off a cliff that is adulthood. Of course, even Holden's desire to be a "catcher in the rye" belies the fact that he has not really even entered adulthood, but is rather still a child mostly playing at being an adult; Holden mishears a poem and believes it is about one person "catching" another in a field rye, rather than two people meeting.

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In fact, most of Holden's journey throughout the story is literally him pretending to be an adult, whether that means trying to be served in a bar, paying a prostitute, and pretending to have gotten shot by said prostitute's pimp (in which case he is actually pretending to be an adult pretending to be a different adult). Holden is afraid of becoming an adult and feels as if he is losing some of his innocence by seeing the cruelty and indiscriminate violence of the world, so instead of attempting to enjoy what little childhood he has by remaining in school, he decides to dive headlong into adulthood by faking it, something that ultimately overwhelms him such that he must retire to a mental health retreat, essentially allowing himself to revert back to a place of protection and innocence.

In contrast to The Catcher in the Rye, the main character of A Bird in the House tells her story with far more temporal distance, allowing….....

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