/lit/ - Literature

>>2297584
cont.

"On the same day, the Soviet 13th Guards Rifle Division commanded by Alexander Rodimtsev arrived in the city from the east side of the river Volga under heavy German artillery fire. The division's 10,000 men immediately rushed into the battle. On 16 September they recaptured Mamayev Kurgan and kept fighting for the railway station, taking heavy losses. By the following day, almost all of them had died. The Soviets kept reinforcing their units in the city as fast as they could. The Germans assaulted up to twelve times a day, and the Soviets would respond with fierce counter-attacks.

The hill changed hands several times. By 27 September, the Germans again captured half of Mamayev Kurgan. The Soviets held their own positions on the slopes of the hill, as the 284th Rifle Division defended the key stronghold. The defenders held out until 26 January 1943, when the Soviet winter offensive relieved them, trapping and destroying the German forces inside Stalingrad.

When the battle ended, the soil on the hill had been so thoroughly churned by shellfire and mixed with metal fragments that it contained between 500 and 1,250 splinters of metal per square meter. The earth on the hill had remained black in the winter, as the snow kept melting in the many fires and explosions. In the following spring the hill would still remain black, as no grass grew on its scorched soil. The hill's formerly steep slopes had become flattened in months of intense shelling and bombardment. Even today, it is possible to find fragments of bone and metal still buried deep throughout the hill."

It even begins to get existential and throughout the novel we seem shrouded ways of attempting to answer
"why we are here"

and perhaps the biggest question raised and dealt with in catcher is "how to come to terms with our finite lives."

Holden is a cosmic humanist-In much the same way Jean-Paul Sartre is. J.D. Salinger has been quoted to have based Holden loosely on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Holden is a deeply troubled and disturbed young boy. His parents paid no attention to him growing up, (perhaps not, but this is how he see's it.) All of the attention they had was placed on Ali because of his leukemia. Holden then began living in a world where he hated Ali for ruining his child hood and "stealing" his parents. When Ali died Holden first began to hate himself to ever hating Ali. He rebels in school because what he really wants is a normal family, and to live at home and have an average life. This is why he continually gets kicked out of schools. It's an early cry for help. Because of Holden's retarded childhood (I mean "retarded" in the actual sense of the word) he is far more in touch with his emotions and stuck, psychologically, in the place he was when he first learned of Ali's death. There are several allusions of this throughout the novel. As Holden grows older, (perhaps only physically) he becomes obsessed with this idea of Ali as a "perfect-person" He see's bad things in the world around him, and for the life of him he can't figure out why they happen. Basic human emotions such as greed, lust, cruelty, pride and narcissism are incomprehensible to Holden. These are all bad things-and if Ali didn't have them, then no one should have them.