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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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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