Alienation In Annie John By Jamaica Kincaid

Alienation Annie and Holden are going through new experiences that result in alienation. Annie has just entered the part in her life where she must stop being a kid. The narrator from Blue Winds Dancing and Holden have had others forcing ideas onto them in which they disagree. These different scenarios lead to the same result. Because of others pressuring these characters, they alienate themselves. Throughout the novel Annie alienates herself as a result of her mother making her grow up. In Annie John, by Jamaica Kincaid, Annie has finally reached the age where she must start learning how to become a lady, or that she is “too old” to do the things she used to do. Before this point her mother and her have always made their clothes out

Because her mother wants her to grow up to be a proper young lady, she sends her to piano and manners lessons. When her mother sends her off, she goofs around and makes a fool of herself. She does this because she thinks that if she shows that she is not mature enough to go to a manners class, then she can still be with her mother. Because of this, she gets kicked out of the class. By fooling around in class, she tries to bring her mother and her closer together, so she will not become alienated. But when her mother exerts too much pressure upon Annie, she alienates herself. While her mother might think it is in Annie’s best interest to separate from her and let her become her own person, Annie sees it as her mother wanting to get away from her. She is not only afraid of abandonment but also afraid that her mom will stop loving her if she loves someone else. Later on, Annie finds her mom rubbing her

Holden is a troubled teenager that does not want to become an adult and wants to preserve the childhood of others, like his sister Phoebe. "Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all." (Salinger, 55) When Holden says this, he is trying to conserve his sister’s and other children’s childhood. He wants to be the catcher in the rye, the guardian of adulthood. He thinks that he can keep others from the suffering he has felt entering the adult world. Holden believes that it is his duty to catch the kids before they go into adulthood. Holden likes the way things are and does not like change. One example is when he tells the reader that he loves the Natural History Museum. He tells us, “The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds