Sometimes I feel a little overwhelmed by how little control I have and how little I know about my future. In Catcher in the Rye, part of Holden's struggles are similar in that it depresses him how formulaic the future is for others, but he just doesn't have it figured out. Esther is very comfortable being a student, but she has no real, concrete plans for the future.
This really resonates with me as a reader and as a young adult because I don't have a clear grasp on what I'm going to do when I grow up. I'm pretty sure I'll be fine, but I have so many different factors pulling me in all directions that I don't know which way to turn permanently. If I were to write a reflective novel as Sylvia Plath and James Joyce did where, the main character portrays events similar to what they experienced, my novel would go something like this:
Picture the scene, a young man sits in his room not doing his homework. He is more of a boy than a man. He is anxious for the next stage of his life but not ready to leave this one. With each assignment completed, he is one step closer to moving onward. What is the next step? Why is there a nagging feeling in his gut?
I have plenty of teenage angst. I feel bad for Holden and Esther because they know less than I do. Holden can't think far enough into the future to see what his poor decisions will lead to, whereas Esther worries too much about the future. I feel somewhere in between those. I try to live life one day at a time and see where it takes me.
I think the issue with Esther isn't that she doesn't have a clear plan for the future, just that her plan isn't what it has cracked out to be. With that, I completely understand her. My one of my biggest goals in life up until now has been to get into college. Once the time to apply came and passed, I felt aimless for a while. I'm fairly sure that's what senoritis is. Anyways, during that time, I had to re evaluate myself and what I was doing. Now, instead of doing things for grades, I had to do things because I wanted to--or else I wouldn't want to do it. It's a weird way to put it, but I'm learning to do things for my direct benefit, and to love, or tolerate the process of doing it.
ReplyDeleteThis really sums up alot of my connection with the books we've been reading. The ability to bridge the gap Between the reality of becoming an independent part of adult society and the very directed and generally unrealistically structured educational roles were raised in, is an incredibly strange question for anyone raised in a semi-developed industrial society.
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