Stream of consciousness vaguely related to Catcher in the Rye

[otherlander]

I guess I get what people are saying about Catcher, that the author never grew up / matured, that Holden was just being spoiled. But when I was reading it I got the impression that he might have been abused. Maybe not, though, maybe it was just his paranoia. Maybe nothing terrible really happened to him and he was just kind of a screwed-up kid. Even so, I kind of take issue with the idea of "he had it good, he shouldn't have been discontent, he was just being self-absorbed, he should have noticed that other people had way more serious problems". I mean, look at the kind of environment he grew up in. The parents seemed to care more about image (their son making them look bad) than they cared about him as a person. They put him in a mental hospital when probably all he needed was therapy, but that's the 1950's conformity-and-fear-of-the-unknown attitude for you. That's the other thing; living in a boarding school for boys only, and in the 1950's, the entire prevailing attitude was probably something along the lines of "guys should be tough/ not express their emotions", that's gotta fuck up yr brain.

As for being self-absorbed when other people had worse problems, true, he was living a privileged life, but is it really a meaningful victory to get enough to live comfortably within a system that routinely chews people up and spits them out? Even if you're not the one being chewed up, that kind of a system is hardly healthy for anyone to live in.

If you're acting in a way that people react to be treating you like you're crazy, and it seems that all they're trying to do is get you to stop acting/talking that way, not going to acknowledge the things that prompt you to act that way, and not going to be accepting of the non-harmful differences in your actions/thoughts, how are you going to get better? It's a lot easier to become more mature/ less self absorbed if there are people around you who actually listen to what you have to say so that you yourself can better understand what bothers you, even if you are privileged and it's just a vast emptiness. I think that the more we understand what bothers us, and the more it is validated by those close to us, the more we can identify with the (sometimes vastly different) problems of others.

And that's the thinking-out-loud post of the day.

[RainDog]

1. ...

:applause:

[otherlander]

2. :D

Note: The only purpose of this post is to shamelessly move my own thread back to the top page. That is all.