All posts from here on will be for Coming of Age Novel

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Is the Bell Jar Really Gone?

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    One of the more important questions that the ending of the The Bell Jar  leaves unanswered is to what extent the bell jar Esther felt trapped by is really gone. Esther herself even acknowledges this, "How did I know that someday … the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?" (Plath, 241). It's unclear to if it's even entirely gone by this point, and it's possible it could just be replaced by another one. Esther also mentions on page 238 that the other girls at college were under a different kind of bell jar. Esther's college experience has been one where she felt very trapped by the pressure on her to succeed and to have a plan for her future, so in that way the entire academic world has been somewhat of a bell jar for her. However, she seems to be more or less back to her old self by the end of the book, but with a different outlook on the world.     Adding to the fear of the bell jar is Buddy's comment about who Esther wo...
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Why Holden Doesn't Actually Hate Movies

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    Throughout The Catcher in the Rye Holden constantly mentions that he hates the movies. So much so that it's one of the first things we learn about him when on the second page he says "If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies. Don't even mention them to me" which was also in reference to DB being in Hollywood. However, they seem to keep coming up in the story, and he even has some memories of seeing movies with Phoebe as well as DB multiple times. He mentions having seen her favorite, The 39 Steps multiple times as well and here he doesn't even seem to dislike it (Salinger 76). There's also the trip he goes on at the beginning of the book with Ackley and Brossard to see a movie though they never end up actually going to it (Salinger 42). And then there's the fact that he seems to  talk about movies in a way that implies that he's seen enough to know they're all bad. While that might have been possible in New York in the 1940s, but i...
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The Role of Secrets in Disco

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    Throughout the chapter Disco Jason and other people in his life start to reveal a lot of secrets that have been building and weighing on him over the course of the book. He starts by revealing how Neal Brose has been extorting him for "popularity lessons", then later he finally tells Michael about the broken watch, and Michael tells Jason about the divorce (Mitchell 260; 277-278). There's also the lesson from Miss Lippetts about secrets, which may have been part of the reason he finally talked about the watch, and it also one of the few times Jason has said anything in class. It seems like that made Jason start to reconsider the secrets he had been keeping after seeing it in a classroom setting, though by that point he had already started to throw out a lot of already arbitrary rules. The one secret that he doesn't tell anyone in this chapter is his connection to what happened to Ross Wilcox, which may have been more so because he didn't think he needed to do ...
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