Book Report of The Catcher in The Rye.doc

Book Report of The Catcher in The RyeThe Catcher in the Rye is set around the 1950s and is narrated by a young man named Holden Caulfield. The first-person narrative follows Holden's experiences in New York City in the days following his expulsion from Pencey Prep, a fictional college preparatory school in Pennsylvania.Holden was born in New York, a wealthy middle-class families. School teacher and his parents forced him to study hard in order to succeed so that he can buy a Cadillac in the future, but what he do is to wander all day in school, to talk about women, alcohol and sex, and he could not understand anything around , thus he did not mind studying hard, and of course he was always punished. When he was expelled from the fourth, he did not dare go home. He wandered alone in the busiest city-- New York, lived in a small inn, visited nightclubs, and spent time with his bored girlfriend in the cinema. Besides, he unwittingly called a prostitute. He can not help but hug and cuddle vanity girlfriend hold, at the same time, his heart is very depressed. So he attempted to escape the hypocrisy of the adult world to actively look for batch purity and truth experiences and feelings. Such extreme mental irreconcilable contradiction lead to the situation that he eventually collapsed, lying in a mental hospital.The novel is about a young character’s growth into maturity. Holden Caulfield is an unusual protagonist for a bildungsroman because his central goal is to resist the process of maturity itself. He wants everything to be easily understandable and eternally fixed, like the statues of Eskimos and Indians in the museum. He is frightened because he is guilty of the sins he criticizes in others, and because he can’t understand everything around him. But he refuses to acknowledge this fear, expressing it only in a few instances. Instead of acknowledging that adulthood scares and mystifies him, Holden invents a fantasy that adulthood is a world of superficiality and hypocrisy , while childhood is a world of innocence, curiosity, and honesty. Nothing reveals his image of these two worlds better than his fantasy about the catcher in the rye: he imagines childhood as an idyllic field of rye in which children romp and play; adulthood, for the children of this world, is equivalent to death—a fatal fall over the edge of a cliff. His created understandings of childhood and adulthood allow Holden to cut himself off from the world by covering himself with a protective armor of cynicism. But as the book progresses, Holden’s experiences, particularly his encounters with Mr. Antolini and Phoebe, reveal the shallowness of his conceptions.。