While reading Catcher in the Rye, we're going to be thinking
about coming-of-age (the bildungsroman genre) and what that means for us
in two interrelated ways: how we move from innocence to experience, and
how we begin to construct a public self out of our private self. One
may argue that Holden has difficulty expressing his the shape of his
private self in social situations: his inner logic becomes distorted
when expressed publicly.
As a first step down this road,
try writing (in the comment section below) about something you became
aware of as you became mature, which you felt very differently about
when you were younger. This could be a reality in the world that you
are now aware of and having feelings about, or a part of your experience
in life for which your feelings have changed considerably over the
years. Try your best to be as clear as you can about how your private
self handled this new awareness.
When you're little, you learn everything from your parents. You learn to be a better person, by following their steps. However, as you start to grow, you have to try to find your own identity, and try to look in the world, a place where you can be found and feel comfortable in. However, that process of changing your feelings and accommodating to a new way of feeling certain situations, is the hardest part in growing up. When I was younger, the idea of death, the idea of one day having to go, was something that hurt me, because I didn't have the sense of what dying really was. I lost my grandmother, and I never knew about it, until like a few weeks later, because they were so scared of my reaction when finding out. I was afraid of one day not being able to be with her anymore, and when I found out that day has come, I couldn't contain myself. I guess the emotion of really realizing that death really exists, is what changed my perspective in viewing my feelings. I never knew that something could hurt that much, until I actually experienced it, myself. You realize that it's time to grow up, and you have to leave all the toys behind, all the little arguments that didn't make sense, and prepare to deal with all the changes you will encounter next. Feelings of fairy tales, and all those princesses stories were gone, I had to face my real monsters. Knowing how to deal with your emotions and feelings is something that can change you for a life time, because one little mistake you make, you don't know how to fix it, and how to deal with it. So, certainly, feelings changing and all that climax within that topic, was absolutely what changed my private self, making my public self.
ReplyDeletei like cats in my pants
ReplyDeleteOne thing that my younger self never really grasped was the fact that not everyone in the world is looking out for you. When you are yonger you tend to see the good in everyone even when they may or may not be a good person. When you are young you have an innocence about you that blocks out things that are not pleasnt or good. As you start to mature and experience different things you start to realize the bad parts of life. When you get to be a certain age you start to understand more about the world. I think that i started to really realize that not everyone was looking out for my best intentions when i enterd highschool. High school has taught me that teachers care about you but not to the extent that your parents have all through your childhood. I also think that becomeing more mature and less dependet on people is a good thing because it teaches us to be more self relient.
ReplyDeleteWhen we were younger, we sometimes would think differently about things than we currently do. Youth brings about naive thoughts and when we were young we hadn’t experienced life enough to know what it is all about. When I was younger, I only thought death came to those who were killed by either somebody else or by sickness. I was watching a cartoon one day and one of the characters was aged by some sort of magical being until they were close to the brink of death. When I watched that show I learned for the first time that everyone dies eventually and that terrified me. I began crying my eyes out because I didn’t want to die. Currently I’m still terrified of death but I think because I’ve experience more things and I understand the world more I now understand that its something that can’t be helped. I can’t really stop death so the best thing for me to do will be to make the most out of my life. Being young and fearless of death was a great time but it was important for me to grow up and learn to watch out for myself.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was younger I didn't have an idea of how hard life actually was. As a child, I think that everyone has a false idea of life of when they are older, that they can live wherever they want, do whatever they want because life for a kid is like that. People treat them with all the attention they could ever need, so much attention that they start to get the idea that they are special. When kids start to think this, they start to believe that life will be so easy for them. However, at a certain age, they reach a point where they experience something that shows them how hard life actually is. Especially when they reach a higher level in school, like middle or high school, then they start to realize that they have to start thinking about how they are going to handle their lives in the future. So once they reach that point, they're childhood view about life disappears, and they are faced with the reality of the world that they are going to have to face.
ReplyDeleteWhen i was younger i always believed everyone was genuinely nice, which is pretty dangerous being a kid. But now i learned the difference of being blind by my own hopes that everyones nice. Now when i meet people i study their eyes, their tone, Even there body language. I never trust anybody with anything unless i am 100% sure that they are nothing but good news for me. Like when i was little i would trust everybody. id tell them everything that i thought was important. which was proably not a big deal but now if i was still like that id probably have alot of more hurt and sadness in my life. But when i figure people out, its not like i act any differently when im talking to a strangers, bc i feel if im real with them i expect them to real back. and most of the time im happy with the people in my life and there are very few issues with trust and actual friendships. dont stay to cautious but stay cautious enough.
ReplyDeleteAs a child, you are sometimes unaware of the parenting that can be happing within a family. Going up as the middle child of five, I have seen all the struggles that my older sisters went through. I saw that siblings or people could express love no matter what is happening. Soon my parents were starting to become hard on me. I noticed the change of rules from my relatives starting around middle school. Turning twelve or thirteen and entering a new school can be a big step in life. Knowing that I was going through a big change, my parents needed to push me in a new way, and thats why I think that their parenting changed. At that time I believed what their rules were extreme but now I see that they did it for the best. Having a change like that can sometimes make a person despise their parents, but it was a good challenge for me and my parents. My parent's parenting change my public life for the better. I have become mature and not as niave as I once was.
ReplyDeleteIn the course of growing up everyone learns things that are more acceptable and things that are more important to us when we are older verses when we were younger. A bigger factor many kids do not take into play is reception of the future. When we were younger we did not think about tomorrow. Today was what we looked forward to and we never really had goals that proceeded longer than an hour or for a day. When we’re turning into a young adult is when we start to realize what we need to do to maintain the lifestyle we want. When my parents would talk about bills, payments, savings accounts I would never think much of it. Save a little money and we could have a vacation I thought, but it is much more than that. Adults think save money so our children will have money for college, so if any disaster happened we would be prepared . They reflect ourselves around the future and money though when I was young none of that mattered. As children we played it by ear. The future was taken one day at the time. During the transition of making these decisions of long term effects and goals it made my private self have to become more structured and focused. It changed me to be in the situations I am in today and made me realize goals make you happy in the long run as it gives you a sense of purpose.
ReplyDeleteThe day i realized that santa wasn't real changed my life forever. When i was little, i was obsessed with santa and christmas. You could never get another kid to make as many cookies and milk as i did on christmas eve. Every year me and my sister would read The Night Before Christmas and then sleep in her room. She was always afraid of santa but i never was. The day i found out that Santa wasnt real my whole life was different because he was such a huge part of it before. Christmas was so different for me because i never made the cookies anymore and i wasn’t as excited to get presents that were from my parents. Also i no longer had the motivation to be so good because i knew Santa wouldn’t find out about everything bad i did. I have definetly been more rebellious since them. This was a huge part of my childhood that was taken away from me by my parents so i also was so mad at them because they had lied to me about it for so long. The fact that santa is not real has changed my life in substantial ways.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was younger I believed almost everything my parents said was true, like the tooth fairy, the Easter bunny, Santa and eating chocolate will give you acne. When i figured out that this wasn't real I was really upset. I felt like my whole life was a lie. And that everything that my parents had ever said to me wasn't true. It made my aware that one of my biggest pet peeves is lying. I had a lot of trust issues for many years after this experience. Looking back on it now I feel like I have really grown and matured in many ways. It changed me for the better because now I don't believe everything that I am told. So, it actually helped me think for myself. Which is a really good skill to have. So, I didn't know it at the time but it actually helped me for the better.
ReplyDeleteThis is going to be different from everyone else's who wrote about santa and the first experience of death. Something in my life that i found out was not all the bad once i began to mature and experience life is going to prep schools and boarding schools. I grew up listening to all negative comments regarding private schools. I heard that if you try hard enough you can do the same things in a public school. The fact of the matter though is that you might be able to so the same things, but out of a private school you can have more chances and automatically have an advantage.From the time i was younger my dad created an illusion in my mind that they were not necessary and they were just for rich kids. As i got older and began to experience more, my eyes opened to other opportunities. i began to see that public schools education cannot keep up with prep schools and that the connections you make at these schools give you better chances later in life. The people who are at these schools know so many people and can help you to be more successful after high school. The education at these schools is better because of the resources they can attain due to the money they have from donations and tuition. They have such a diverse education also, that you can be in a class alone if you want to take a class they usually do not offer. They actually do a lot for their students and a public school simply cannot prepare kids like a prep school can. Like i said this is a completely different situation than most of the other responses, but this is an experience that makes me question my decision making leading up to this point and changed my opinion about the subject forever.
ReplyDeleteAs a younger child I thought of the world as an innocent place. I believed that that we lived in a world of acceptance and peace, but as I grew older I discovered that our earth is also full of disappointment and strife. When I was a child I was secluded to a smaller area and wasn’t adapt to the issues our people face today. My private self was my public self, I shared all of my problems and didn’t hold back. All of the affairs and dilemmas were irrelevant and I lived carefree. It wasn’t until I was about five when my grandfather died and I learned that pain does exist, and that not everything lasts forever. I remember seeing my mom crying and it hurt me to see her in that state. I hadn’t yet grasped that he was dead, I just thought he was on vacation or something. My private self decided to hold in my pain, to make myself seem stronger. Even at five I felt that I needed to stay firm to act like my moms rock and not to show my fear. After that day I started to realize that life can be disappointing but its those moments of disappointment that you learn to appreciate the happy times even more.
ReplyDeleteThe mind of a young child is extremely innocent and naive. It's funny to look back on when I was in elementary school and realize how inexperienced I was. Even now I am still less experienced than I will be in ten or twenty years. When I was a child one of the many things that I thought was true that ended up not being true at all was that if people got married they could never get divorced. I truly believed that a marriage was forever binding with no exceptions except if the man or woman died. No couple in my family has been divorced so I was never exposed to that type of situation. As I got older I came upon the reality that almost half the people that get married get divorced. I think this did change me as a person because I believed that once I met the person I was going to marry, we would stay together forever. It changed my perspective on people that are in relationships and even my parents relationship. Today, my parents are still together but, I know now that there is always that slim possibility that something could happen to them. When I used to believe that people couldn't get divorced it gave me hope that things will be permanent. Now I look at things like marriage are not as important and permanent as they used to be. Now it makes me look at things like marriage as not as important as they should be to people.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if this blogpost is late but I will write it anyways, just in case I'm not late. When I was a kid, I always thought that everyone shared a common goodness. Of course I knew that not everybody was good, we learn from fairytales and storybooks at a very early age that bad people exist and will do anything to get what they want. I guess that I never really thought those narrow-minded, self-serving people were so close to home. Children are taught to trust authority and believe that the government wishes to protect them. That's probably true, to a certain extent, but not in the way I once believed. I thought that the people in power genuinely cared about the well-being of the people of their city or country, and I've come to learn that all they really care about is maintaining control and making money.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was young I never truly realized what death really was. My parents told me it was like a deep slumber that you undergo when you get too old. I never really understood it until i had witnessed it first hand. My dog at the time was fairly young even so he had been subject to bone cancer. I knew nothing at the time and when he was passing on I stayed next to him without knowing he was dying. His breathing became heavy and he eventually stopped. I thought he was just asleep but my mom drove off with him to have him cremated. I thought he would be back and so I waited for her to return. When she came back she said that he would not come back and explained to me what death meant. Death is what must happen to everything eventually and it may even be untimely. No matter how sad or unfair death will always happen. So it is better to accept death and know that it can happen in any way at any time.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was younger I remember I used to hate when other children, whether they were my age or younger, would copy me in anyway. Things such as, clothing, behavior, toys, or actions would all cause conflict. I feel that I would act this way because I myself was doing the same thing, I would always copy and try to act like my older cousins and their friends. It made me feel like I was older than I actually was and made me feel more independent. But as I grew up and became more mature, I realized that I actually admire when children try to act like me. When I was an aid in the preschool this year I truly enjoyed the feeling of having the children look up to me and think of me as their role model. It's almost an honor to know that children think of you as something so special, that they want to be and behave just like you. It made me realize that being copied is not the correct term to use, more like being inspiring to the younger generation. As I grew up my thoughts on this subject changed as I became a teenager and had no reason to act like people who are older than me, but to be a good role model for the people who now look up to me as I did when I was their age.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was younger, I used to be terrified of dying. Mostly everyone is, because it has to happen someday. When I was younger though, I would be afraid to go to sleep because I believed there was a chance I wouldn’t wake up in the morning. After I had a few deaths in my family, I began to accept that death has to happen at some point. Now I’m not really afraid of it anymore because I’d rather live my life with as little worries as possible. When people dwell on the subject of death, it gets overwhelming and a chain of mysteries pop up. Dealing with deaths in my family has certainly helped me to overcome my childhood fears of death. It’s more of a happier and less scary thought because whatever happens, It’s all the Universe’s plan.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was younger, I thought that the world was much more complicated than it really is, and that people were much simpler than in reality. My parents really didn't influence my opinions, nor did they lie to me very much, so I was basically left to believe whatever I wanted. I thought that the world was much bigger and had more boundaries than there really are. For example, I thought that different states would have completely different cultures from other states. However, I also thought that there was a clear distinction from bad people and good people. Either someone was evil or a hero, and, of course, I was a good person. As I grew up, I began to understand how complex every person was. I realized that everyone, including myself, had good and bad in their personalities. By then, I understood how the world really worked. I then became aware of how connected everyone really is, no matter how different their personalities. It was very strange for me to think about, because I had always thought that people whom I had always learned to be evil, had nothing in common with me at all. I began to think about things much differently when I realized that everyone had good and bad in their personalities.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was younger I thought that life would be so easy and decisions would be so simple. I didn’t realize how hard decisions like going to a certain college, getting married, and saving money would be so important and difficult. I thought that colleges would accept you if you were smart (mediocre) you would always just marry your soul mate, and money would never be an issue if you had a job. I am now thinking of colleges worrying about my grades and what I want to major in, and if I pick wrong it will impact my life significantly. Dating looked so much easier in the movies where everyone ends up with who they are suppose to, but life doesn’t work like that, people get divorced or dies alone and that scares me. Money is a big issue because America has a carp economy and doesn’t offer many jobs so you can’t be average any more you have to be the best. Im not the best at anything!!!! I don’t want to grow up it’s a trap for anxiety and depression
ReplyDeleteWhen I was younger I didn't understand the meaning and value that life has. I truly thought that because I believed I was never going to die, that I wouldn't. Also that those who around me would never die, only those I didn't know or care about would. I didn't understand all the emotions that come along with life and all the responsibilities. Now I know that life is not endless on earth, but if we live good lives it can become endless in the after life. I also know how it takes so much time and effort to actually live and that each person is accountable for their own lives and is excepted to be responsible. I have come to realize that no life may not be endless on earth, but there is always hope for the after life and that life is a lot harder than it seems to a little girl with no responsibilities, but that it can be worth it.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was younger I used to believe that money was everything in life and that if you were rich than you could be the happiest person alive. As I have grown older, I realize now that money can make life easier and be useful when it comes to buying things you need or luxuries. However, I have also acknowledged the fact that just because you don't have a ton of money or you do, money can't buy happiness. Money may buy things that make you happy or excited when you purchase them but it can't buy friends or family. It also can't give you the feeling of knowing that your family loves you. Ultimately, you can be happy living paycheck to paycheck if you can accept yourself for who you are and it helps to have others around you that love you. When I was little I had the goal of becoming rich because I thought you had to be rich to be happy and successful. I now would still like to get rich, but who doesn't want to? But, I realize that if I don't become rich, I can still live a wonderful and happy life.
ReplyDeleteI grew up thinking that people were caring, and that they wanted to help you with your problems. But as I've been maturing I came to the realization that they don't. People today don't have patience for screw ups, the real world doesn't baby anyone. And it's not that people are heartless, cruel animals. It's just that nobody has the time to help you out because most normal people have problems of their own. With this all in mind I've figured out that ignorance isn't bliss, and that as long as you take care of yourself and only yourself life's a lot more enjoyable. You shouldn't have to lean on anybody.
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