Posted by Kyle Scribner on February 08, 19100 at 14:54:05:

In Reply to: I have a question, don't worry, I'm not asking for easy answers because I haven't read the book :o) posted by Kate on February 03, 19100 at 19:52:08:

: Hey,
: I am a highschool student who just finished reading Catcher in the Rye. I wasn't moved by it a great deal, but I can definitely understand why we had to read it! Unfortunately, I haven't had any discussion of it and am sort of at a disadvantage. I haven't been in school for months because I have a chronic illness but have been keeping on track of everything because I have an English teacher who is an angel. However, she is one who seriously discourages giving students answers and very rarely even asks questions. She believes---and I'm inclined to agree---that one should not read literature with the intention of answering questions, but rather with the desire to form one's own questions depending on how a work affects you. We're never given topics for essays, we just read the books and then write formally about them. With this book, she basically just dropped the text off at my house, told me to read it, and then talk to her about it. She is a very intelligent person (I'm not sure why she's wasted in the high school system!) and her curriculums always make perfect sense. Everything comes in a logical order and progression and we use the knowledge we gain from one text to push ourselves further in the next. However, I am really confused about why we had to read Catcher in the Rye in the context we read it in! We just finished studying anti-transcendentalism, with a dominant focus on Hawthorne. The last major work we read was "The Scarlet Letter." I don't see why she would put Salinger and Hawthorne back to back! I asked her and she just said, "you figure it out!" Was there any logic to putting these readings together? I've thought about it and I just can not see any connections bewteen good 'ol Hester and Holden! Any ideas?

: ---Kate

Kate--
Holden is the personification of existentialist angst.

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