Now I finally get what we were talking about in class earlier. We were talking about close to the ending where Holden gets the poem mixed up. I liked that part. he says he wants to stand in a field of rye where there are a bunch of kids playing, and when one gets too close to the edge of the cliff, he'll be the one to catch them. The catcher in the rye. It's a noble occupation, even looking at it both ways. If you look at it literally, saving kids from falling off cliffs is a very good thing. If you look at it more symbolically, it's still good. I think what he really wants to do, when he says he wants to be the catcher in the rye, is save the kids from themselves and the world around them. He doesn't want them to have to experience the things he did, as he grew up. Facing reality is hard as a kid, and he wants to save them from that. Or it could be that he wants to save them from the depression that he feels accompanies being an adult. When they're running and playing, they are happy, and he wants to save them from falling into that depression. Sometimes I wish he could have caught me.
Because of that little revelation in chapter twenty-three, I finally get the significance of the title. It was starting to bother me because it has nothing to do with anything up until this explanation.
His sister sounds awesome. Any little girl that has blue pajamas with red elephants on them is okay with me. She almost immediately calls Holden on his bluff. She's obviously very observant. I can't believe their parents left her home alone in New York City at night. They probably live in one of the better neighborhoods, but that doesn't really mean anything in New York. You can tell that Holden would get really messed up, even more so than he already is, if anything happened to her. She's one of the few things he actually cares about.
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