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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Was Bruce's Death a Suicide or an Accident?

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     Bruce's death is one of the most important events in this book and a lot of Alison's reflections and contemplations revolve around it. She specifically mentions how she sees that her coming out is linked with his death, and while that's probably true to some extent and it makes a sense in the narrative of Fun Home , based on what she says in the book I still don't think it was actually a suicide. The main reasons Alison gives for it being intentional is how her coming out seems to have caused the divorce which drove him to suicide (Bechdel 58-59) There's also the constant theme throughout the book that Bruce more or less failed his coming of age due his staying closeted, and that that sense of failure could have also driven him to suicide, and the sense that he kind of felt trapped in Beech Creek (Bechdel 125) However, Alison also gives us reason to believe it wasn't a suicide: she mentions that Bruce jumped back in front of the truck like he'd seen a s...
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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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