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

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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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Criticizing Murdock

     Maureen Murdock's model of the heroine's journey is somewhat like Victoria Lynn Schmidt's model and the Hero's Journey, but is generally more restrictive and harder to apply.  It would still be much easier to just have one definitive monomyth that was more broadly applicable and didn't discriminate based on gender. And that emphasis on gender and to a lesser extent on spirituality is the main problem with Murdock's model. It's difficult to apply when it forces stories to revolve around or heavily feature these concepts and as a monomyth it definitely shouldn't, though much like Victoria Lynn Schmidt's model it may not be entirely intended to be a monomyth. However, if it was broader and more about identity that just gender it would be more easily applicable, like in the case of Quicksand where it uses some ideas from Murdock's model but in the context of race.      While it's not as useful as Victoria Lynn Schmidt's model, they two d...
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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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