The Dawning Of Mourning Essay Research Paper free essay sample

The Dawning Of Mourning Essay, Research Paper The morning of mourningThe Catcher in the RyeJD SalingerLittle, Brown, 1951When JD Salinger # 8217 ; s The Catcher in the Rye was foremost published, the reappraisals were hostile and dismissive. However, by 1953 when I, a huffish 17-year-old American, read the book, it was already a authoritative. I could declaim whole transitions by bosom while looking suggestively into the eyes of my day of the month who, like me, thought everything about the grownup universe was, as Holden Caulfield said, # 8220 ; phoney # 8221 ; .The book celebrated the good English pupil, the sensitive foreigner, the child who in today # 8217 ; s universe might be a # 8220 ; gross out # 8221 ; . It mocked the cruel athletes and the successful 1s who played by the regulations. Holden may hold been expelled from assorted schools, but all virtuousness, all human kindness, was expelled with him.In the 1950s, conformance and lip service were the enemy of all that was critical, interesting, original, promising and true ; at least this is how we saw the universe. We will write a custom essay sample on The Dawning Of Mourning Essay Research Paper or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Holden would non be silenced. He would non conceal in the fog that covered us all. He had existent feelings.So many of us loved Holden Caulfield because he, like us, was an foreigner that, had we noticed, it would hold been a major logical job. If the figure of manque Holdens was anyplace equal to the figure of those who carried the book the manner Jehovah # 8217 ; s Witnesss pack their Christian bibles, how stray or singular could we be? Were we in fact foreigners, or were we simply foot soldiers in a new ground forces that was to look in the sixtiess? However, it was, Salinger # 8217 ; s attack on the # 8220 ; phoney # 8221 ; that seemed to me the kernel and the glorification of the book.But when I picked it up once more late and reread it, I saw that I had, in fact, missed the point. This short novel is about mourning and loss. Holden # 8217 ; s journey through assorted schools begins with the decease of his brother of leukaemia and his parents # 8217 ; effort to protect hi m by non leting him to go to the funeral. He locks himself in the garage and interrupt his custodies in rage. It is mute heartache that ails Holden.The following decease in this book is of a schoolmate bullied into falling out of his residence hall window. This decease is besides non discussed by the grownups in the school and is covered up wholly. When Holden admirations in a celebrated transition about where the ducks in Central Park go in Wisconsin nter, it is clear he is wondering about the disappeared, the unspoken of, the removed, the dead. While isolation, dramatic loneliness are common to the adolescent soul, what was particular to Holden was his hard-earned knowledge that death was coming, had come and no one would speak of it.Holden said that when he grew up he wanted to be a â€Å"catcher in the rye†. This catcher was a person who would run through the fields that were on the crest of a sharp cliff and whose responsibility it was to catch the children playing in those fields before they fell to their deaths. Holden dreams of saving his brother, and perhaps not just his own brother.This book was written in the wake of the second world war, when all over America families had lost their sons and brothers and husbands – but in the culture at large this was not a time for mourning or remembering; it was a time for building and booming, and a determined optimism covered the grief that must have afflicted so ma ny.This book was also written in the face of the silence about the Holocaust. In the immediate post-war years, there was so very little comment on the deaths we knew had occurred. As with the the death of the weaker boy at Holden’s boarding school, no one seemed to care.The numbers of dead were shocking. The absence of those who would have lived and loved must have created a huge hole in humanity – but no one was talking about it, not in the early 50s, and certainly not in the late 40s when Salinger wrote this novel.Delicious isolation. A romantic sense of one’s self as special. A cold eye cast on others less prone to read poetry. These are the common marks of misfit adolescents on the edge of trouble. But Holden’s real trouble was silence, unrelieved mourning, grief he could not name.Decades later, I read this book, with affection, of course, for Holden, for my own misspent youth, but with a new appreciation for the ground the author was breaking. In tod ay’s world of grief counsellors accompanying every disaster, and therapists as common as bus drivers, mourning would never be allowed to fester unattended, which is, on the whole, a good thing. But The Catcher in the Rye remains the book that froze history at the moment before we could see ourselves as children falling from the cliff, as a people in mourning.