/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14647617]

Holden booked a prostitute date and tried to have a deep conversation with a prostitute. Shocking it didn't work out, what the fuck did he expect?

This kid searches for the point to life and it ultimately culminates to some pointless moment with a hooker. Great read.

[Anonymous No.14647628]

>>14647617
he's spiraling into a psychotic break due to unresolved trauma and probably mental illness

[Anonymous No.14647666]

>>14647617

[Anonymous No.14647682]

>This kid searches for the point to life and it ultimately culminates to some pointless moment with a hooker. Great read.

No, it ultimately culminates with him pushing away anybody and everybody who tries to help him and him getting put in a hospital. Aside from that, this but unironically.

[Anonymous No.14647690]

>>14647628
>unresolved trauma and probably mental illness
Isn't it obvious by now that one leads to the other?

[Anonymous No.14647705]

>>14647690
There's being unbalanced because of trauma and then there's having a genetically caused mental illness, they're different. Holden seems like he has both.

[Anonymous No.14647720]

>>14647617
Did you actually read the book at all past that point?

[Anonymous No.14647744]

>>14647617
>>14647628
That book is one of the most beautiful and poignant modern coming of age stories. He's facing that transition from childhood wonder to the drab alienation of modern industrial society. He doesn't understand why everyone is so sad and "phony" and he's trying to reconcile this new world with the joy and happiness of his childhood. He tries to strike up with a prostitute because he still has a spark of spirit and hope from his childhood. His human spirit has't totally been crushed yet. And so he reaches out because he wants, unironically, them to be happy again. He's trying to lift up their spirits without being aware of the wider social forces that are crushing everyone. As he becomes more and more aware of the sadness of the modern world, his compassion slips into hopelessness and he contemplates suicide (him looking far out the window).

Holden speaks to the wildness that is inside all of us, the primordial innocence before civilization crushed us and made us all gears in the giant social machine. The book was so popular because so many people were having the same coming of age experiences as teenagers growing up in the industrializing 20th century.

[Anonymous No.14647843]

>>14647744
>He tries to strike up with a prostitute because he still has a spark of spirit and hope from his childhood.
Why a prostitute of all things?

[Anonymous No.14647868]

>>14647617
Also, it's obvious from the way it's written that he orders her with the intention of actually losing his virginity, but he can't manage to stick it out because he lacks the desire to treat women as objects that all of his peers have been inculcated with.

[Anonymous No.14647893]

>>14647744
"We" aren't all like Holden at all. Furthermore, Holden didn't have a good childhood that he's losing by being forced to join society. He didn't join society, he refused to engage in the awful behaviors everyone else expected of him. That's the entire point of the book.

Holden is an outcast who can't fit into bourgeois society because his traumatic childhood caused him to be too empathetic and conscious of the pain of other people to engage in exploitative bourgeois behaviors like careerism and abusing women.

The idea that Holden was just some normie lamenting the loss of his youth to the corporate machine is asinine. His childhood was terrible, he is utterly incapable of conforming to the corporate machine, and what he's really doing is trying to find a way to create a childhood for himself and his sister in the first place.

Expecting that everyone else shares your perspective and experience, "we all had great childhoods and feel terrible about how things really are as adults", is the height of bourgeois arrogance. We're not all cogs in your shitty machine, yearning to break free. A lot of the people on this website in particular never fit into modern society and never even wanted to try.

[Anonymous No.14647925]

>>14647617
>Shocking it didn't work out, what the fuck did he expect
That sentiment is a huge part of what the book is about. "What the fuck did I expect" is basically what he's feeling the whole time but he can't quite shake his naivety and keeps externalizing the issue.

Holden doesn't have his shit together, but he's really trying. You're not supposed to admire him or think his head is on straight.

Just recognize where he's at, feel some compassion. It's unfortunate that as a basically sweet guy he lacks the understanding to shift his perspective and accept the real world.

[Anonymous No.14647978]

>>14647893
>>14647744

I disagree with both your perspectives on what the world is like, but feel that I love this book for similar reasons. And I like that about it, too.

The world is a strictly better place today than ever before. At a minimum there's never been less per-capita murder, enslavement, torture, etc. An average person's life is much less vulnerable to random irrecoverable misery. Industry and economy have both been part of that.

From my perspective, it's truly not the world's fault that Holden can't see a place for himself in it yet. He's a sincere guy who really just wants to do good, but he's at a difficult point in realizing that "good" becomes much more complicated as life goes on. Eventually, you have to accept the world as it is, that it has arrived at the point it has for indisputable reasons, before you can take on the task of trying to improve it. It's hard to do for honest idealists.

[Simon Magus !!B6w9tJAyfF8 No.14648107]

Book sucks

[Anonymous No.14648163]

>>14647978
I didn't say anything about what the "world" is like, nor about whether we live in good or bad times. My statements were solely concerned with bourgeois society, the bourgeois society of the 1940's in particular.

Your attempt to one-up the conversation by proclaiming the whole issue of mortality and the ability of human beings to make a difference in this world too complicated to deal with is a tired centrist trope. You absolutely have the power to decide whether you behave in a cruel or unjust way, and whether you interact with or participate in cruel and unjust systems. The refusal of bourgeois individuals to take responsibility for the shitty things they do is every bit as cowardly when they argue that it's for the good as when they argue that it's for the bad, if not worse.

[Anonymous No.14648170]

>>14648163
*morality

[Anonymous No.14648187]

>>14647744
Cringe.

[Saint Peter No.14648196]

>>14648107
STFU

[Anonymous No.14648236]

>>14648163
>by proclaiming the whole issue of mortality and the ability of human beings to make a difference in this world too complicated to deal with is a tired centrist trope.

I didn't say the world is TOO complicated to deal with, just MORE complicated than any young idealist would be prepared to accept without effort. Obviously it's possible and important to behave morally, but exactly what that means and whether it's perceived that way by the people you care about is often genuinely arguable.

I don't personally see how you can think your broad classification of people and things as "bourgeois" as not being a description of what the world is like. I may also be inferring an economic subtext you don't intend as well, though really I'm reading "bourgeois" as a casual and self-serving dismissal of things you don't personally value.

[Anonymous No.14648300]

>>14647617
Seems mundane now but exciting when I was 14

[Anonymous No.14648441]

>>14647744
>contemplates suicide (him looking far out the window).
Brainlet here, is looking out a window a common metaphor for that? And if so, how.

[Simon Magus !!B6w9tJAyfF8 No.14648449]

>>14648196
U mad ? Your own fault for liking a midwit-tier piece of shit

Also you're probably a woman

[Anonymous No.14648478]

>>14647978
>The world is a strictly better place today than ever before.
definitely not true. as for everything else you say, there are a lot of revolutionaries throughout history who would disagree with you that large social forces that go on for hundreds of years can be the source of misery.

[Anonymous No.14648483]

>>14647843
it's a common theme. think of the movie Taxi Driver. the prostitute represents the ultimate fall of innocent. once a happy little girl playing in the forest, smiling with her family as content as can be, now at the pits of degradation and despair. Men are naturally drawn to want to protect women. Holden's innocence and naiveté draws him to the prostitute because of these protective instincts and wish to "save" her.

[Anonymous No.14648491]

>>14647843
The pimp in the elevator kind of just sent her to him and Holden just went with the flow

[Anonymous No.14648514]

>>14647893
>>14647978

>Holden was just some normie lamenting the loss of his youth to the corporate machine is asinine.

You've completely misread what I've written. Holden was never a normie. that's the point. he is of a unique character who's spirit hasn't yet been broken by normie bourgeois society. that's what makes him so morally heroic--the fact that he is an outcast, an outcast against a horrid world.

If Holden had been born among the Piraha hunter gatherers in Amazon, for example, there wouldn't never be the slightest possibility that his personal crises would arise. And, truly, anthropologists have noted that along with absents of depression and suicide, hunter gatherer adolescents don't experience the melancholy that is typical of civilized/industrial teens.

"The Pirahãs show no evidence of depression, chronic fatigue, extreme anxiety, panic attacks, or other psychological ailments common in many industrialized societies." p. 303

"I have never heard a Pirahã say that he or she is worried. In fact, so far as I can tell, the Pirahãs have no word for worry in their language. One group of visitors to the Pirahãs, psychologists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Brain and Cognitive Science Department, commented that the Pirahãs appeared to be the happiest people they had ever seen." p. 305

-Daniel Everett, "Don't Sleep There Are Snakes" (2009)


one could go on and on citing these examples.

[Anonymous No.14648533]

>>14648441
that's a good question. honestly, that's just what my teacher at the time though it was. He was a Duke Ph.D. and was a super lit freak, so I figured he had thought about it carefully and had read other reviews of the matter. but this may just have been his interpretation and he may have been wrong.

But after re-reading it, i think it can definitely be at least one highly reasonable interpretation, if not the only one.

I don't know if the looking out the window thing is a common metaphor for suicide, to be honest.

[Anonymous No.14648623]

>>14648441
Staring out a window is a common metaphor for depression.

[Anonymous No.14649165]

Random thought but I would love to hear what someone like Mr. Rogers thought of Holden.
when he read the book.

[Anonymous No.14649167]

So why did he say this book was impossible to transform into a movie?

[Anonymous No.14650207]

>>14648514
Jesus, man, get over yourself. Holden's not some brilliant martyr and neither are you. He's a good person whose preconceptions are hurting him. Not bourgeois society, not normies, just the way he's adjusting to them.

Oh, by all means, keep citing a single person's anecdotes about a single society. Besides being totally inadequate evidence for your (flagrantly incorrect) premise that hunter-gatherers in general don't get depression and suicide (afflictions that can't possibly have evolved in humans in just the last few millenia, but instead developed as a response to scarcities throughout very early development, and there are definitely records of suicides and depression-like symptoms in every early society that has writing), the fact that societies at a pre-industrial cannot survive direct competition with a post-industrial one matters. Surviving matters. Failing to adapt hurts only you and people who care about you.

Crawl out of your own ass, face reality and improve things that actually exist.

[Anonymous No.14650272]

>>14647617

If Burroughs had written this book everyone in the prep school would have fucked each other in the ass with vaseline then ran away to join an african guerilla tribe and harassed society with constant terrorism lmao

Holden is just apathetic and boring. He didn't try to do shit for the world, he just went around splurging all his money in new york then got his shit pushed in by a pimp.

This book is for weaklings with no revolutionary spirit.

[Anonymous No.14650308]

>>14647893
>He didn't join society, he refused to engage in the awful behaviors everyone else expected of him. That's the entire point of the book.
He didn't join society within the adolescent narrative window of the book, no. But he's still likely fated to sell out like his corporate lawyer father and his Hollywood writer brother — such things are the only likely gainful application of his narrow literariness, and those two are his only "successful" role models; his only alternative is to be like his English teachers, or to end up homeless, or to die. Fleeing into the woods is a popular passing fantasy: it's clear that Holden would never actually do it.

[Anonymous No.14650314]

>>14648107
>>14648196

[Anonymous No.14651349]

>>14649165
No

[Anonymous No.14651458]

>>14647978
>This is your brain on Pinkerism
If you only knew how much of a charlatan Pinker is...

[Anonymous No.14651511]

>>14651458
kek. totally this.

[Anonymous No.14651553]

>>14650207
I never suggested he was a "brilliant martyr." A martyr is someone who sacrifices consciously for a cause. Obviously Holden doesn't do that.

But everything else you write is plainly false. It's not his "preconceptions" that are hurting him, it's reality. He simply hasn't learned to put a mask over everything like the people around him. You're definitely wrong about hunter gatherer depression and suicides. the anthropology is irrefutable and abundant in showing the complete lack of it. Your theory of evolution and depression makes no sense. Modern industrial conditions have arose very very recently in the timespan of human evolution and they are dramatically different from the conditions humans have been adapted physically and psychologically to survive in for millions of years.

there are a few anactodes about depression and suicides in antiquity, the ancient greeks for example, but these were clearly not hunter gatherer societies and even in those cases the rates of depression and suicide were dramatically lower in history than they became through the process of industrialization, and they continue to rise dramatically every day.

Your statement about pre-industrial societies no being able to survive against industrial societies is so obvious its a truism. But what on earth does that have to do with the point that industrial society depresses and alienates people???

[Anonymous No.14652787]

>>14647893
>>14647978
>>14648163
>>14648236
Holden is what happens when someone with an IQ multiple standard deviations above mean is thrown out into the real world after having been sheltered from most of it through a secluded childhood. Why is this a phenomena worth writing about? Because as we entered the late industrial and pre-modern era, people were more afforded this luxury and the theme became much more common and pervasive throughout the upper-middle and middle classes of society. When your poor and high-IQ, you don’t experience this shock because you never got the chance to live in the garden of Eden.

[Anonymous No.14652967]

>>14652787
This is the distinction most upper-class bourgeoise cannot make because they’ve never lived, seen, or been immersed in true a true environment of poverty

[Anonymous No.14654103]

Holden’s life is one big cope for having a jewish dad who didn’t love him and his trials between his IQ and the identity that he can’t seem to find.

[Simon Magus !!B6w9tJAyfF8 No.14654120]

>>14650314
I have a good reason, I do what I want

[Anonymous No.14654126]

>>14654120
What attracts you to Simon Magus in particular?

[Anonymous No.14654134]

>>14652967
dude, unironically: I'm sorry you are poor.

[Anonymous No.14654136]

>>14654120
We do what we want, and we tell you you’re a nigger AND a faggot. Dilate

[Simon Magus !!B6w9tJAyfF8 No.14654170]

>>14654136
Projecting is a very unhealthy mental activity anon, it's sad you're black and a homosexual but you must transcend the flesh

[Simon Magus !!B6w9tJAyfF8 No.14654180]

>>14654126
By tradition he founded one of the early gnostic sects and I have an interest in church history but particularly as regards sects that were considered heretical.

[Anonymous No.14654182]

I was led by friends to believe that, at some point, Holden would start “catching” children from the fields and become a serial killer. Talk about one of the biggest disappointments of my literary life. This book was such a waste of fucking time. And to think that anybody considers this crap an “American Classic”! Utter rubbish.

[Anonymous No.14654272]

>>14650207
Nothing in this post is correct

[Simon Magus !!B6w9tJAyfF8 No.14654475]

>>14654182
Dude that would be sick

[Anonymous No.14654500]

>>14654134
I’m actually unimaginably wealthy. Thanks tho

[Anonymous No.14654607]

>>14654500
wealthy in spirit. You have the right attitude. at the end of the day, that's all that matters.

[Anonymous No.14654663]

>>14654607
Jajajaja :^)

[Anonymous No.14654746]

>>14654180
That's basically a nonanswer, I'd already assumed all that more or less. What is it more specifically?

[Anonymous No.14654751]

>>14654120

kill yourself you fucking faggot