"You ought to go to a boy's school sometimes. Try it sometime," I said. "It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques."
"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
-Holden Caulfield
Goddam Phonies! Boy do I love this book. Like the Seed said, "Cliche' or not, I dug every word of Catcher. I thank you for that Sir." Teen angst is so relatable and so fraking hilarious at the same time. The book can be very angry and sad but Holden is just looking for truth in himself and in life. If you don't like the anger read the passages where he hits on women so funny. And yes if I ever get married and have a son his name will be Holden well Bernardo Holden. Salinger left us a great book, read it!
2 comments:
Bro! You said it right. However, I'm going to have to correct you and Seed on one thing. The work of Mr. Salinger is definitely NOT cliche as his work is the ORIGIN of modern upper-class adolescent angst ridden prose.
His popularity stemmed from the fact that for the first time, someone had the genius and talent to capture a whole generation's, and for that matter a society's zeitgeist. The voice of the disaffected youth is truly embodied in Holden Caufield. But if you want to read something that will haunt your soul try his "Another Day for Bananafish" short in his classic collected short story work "Nine Stories".
Biggups to the master!
Long live Jim Steele! Heh
It really is one of the funniest yet dramatic books on youth and culture. God I love this book. For some odd reason the part where Phoebe holds up her finger to mimmic the character in Hitchcock's "39 Steps" is always in my head. The ideal of that being Holden's memory of his sister. It just captures the loss of youth so well. Really, every damn page is awesome. I need to read again. mean it's so damn funny. He's so damn angry. It captured all us people of the internets. Heh.
I'll name my kid Jim Steele than.
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