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Gene Forrester In The Rye And A Separate Peace

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The novels we have read this year have all connected with themes and characters. I believe the biggest connection for this year was the connection between Gene Forrester from A Separate Peace by John Knowles and Holden Caulfield from The Catcher In The Rye. Both of these boys are looking for a way to find themselves. They need to accept their past and forgive themselves, and they need to accept who they are and who they are becoming. The boys struggle with the fact they are growing up and have to enter the scary world, they must find a way to find their place in the world. Gene and Holden are similar because they both face internal conflicts with their past, growing up, and finding their place in the world,
Gene and Holden are weighed down …show more content…

Both of them “fall,” so to speak, into the adult world and experience the reality and darkness that is out there. They experience the pain, suffering, and phoniness of the world outside their bubble. Gene realizes the horror after he goes and visits his friend, Leper, after Leper comes back from war. Seeing how the adult world turns Leper “psycho,” Gene is scared of what’s out there and doesn’t want to leave his childhood and grow up. Holden is also scared of becoming an adult. “ 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 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 do all day I just be the catcher in the rye and all…”(Salinger 173). Holden doesn’t want to grow up, and he doesn’t want anyone else to grow up. Holden wants everyone to stay young and innocent, including himself, even though he knows the can’t and he knows that he is already grown up himself. Facing the fact that they have to grow up and live in the real world is a real struggle for both Gene and Holden because they know the horrors that they are yet to face so they both try to hold it off as long as

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Holden’s answer was, “‘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(191). Holden wanting to be the catcher in the rye is a good dream to have but it is also an immature dream because he cannot catch everybody that falls off the cliff, which can also be seen as trying to save the children's innocence.

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A. Allie’s death causes Holden to become obsessed with death and this obsession makes him believe that growing up and becoming a “phonie” is like dying; this belief that is planted inside Holden’s head when Allie died is what sends him on a quest to preserve children’s innocence and save them from the “death” of growing up. B. Salinger includes the traumatic story of Allies death that happened years in advance to provide an explanation for Holden’s obsession with death and how he sees loss of innocence as equivalent to dying. Allie died with his innocence still intact, so Holden does not want other children to grow up and have their innocence “die”. C. Holden even admits to being mentally unstable after his brother’s traumatic death when he says, “I was only 13, and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all

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He has trouble growing up and accepting life as it is. Holden thinks adults are "phony" which makes him hate the fact of growing up and staying innocent as much as he can while he is old enough to become an adult. He is frustrated with the world and people which makes him act with anger. His innocent childish dream is to be the Catcher in the Rye, to catch the kids before they become phonies like Holden says about adults. The moment he realizes that he cannot keep kids from falling or in other words, from growing up and becoming adults, he, reaches adulthood, and takes a big step towards it at the end of the novel.

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