In Sag Harbor, Colson Whitehead does a great job narrating the idea of growing up, and reaching the stage of adolescence where you start to gain more responsibilities, such as being able to pay for your own things. To get this money, one must work, and Whitehead's experiences growing up that are detailed in the novel are quite similar to many teenager's experiences in the workplace. Over this past summer, I got my first summer job, and was eager to work to get my own money, as Benji does the same in the novel. Now, looking back I don't know what I was expecting. I know I wasn't expecting sunshine and rainbows, but whatever I was expecting, I should have expected both better and worse of some certain aspects. Food service jobs? Good. People who come to buy things from food service jobs? Less good. People are who truly make the work experience bad or good, and I dealt with my fair share of bad over the summer, just as Benji does in the novel. Dirty clothes, coming home ...
In The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, we see an early representation of mental health institutions, and how bad they were compared to now. If we look at mental health institutions now, we don't typically see electroshock therapy being used, more things are focused on bettering the person instead of electrocuting them until they conform to society's standards. The use of lobotomization is also a much more frowned upon practice, as they were done very unprofessionally in their early days, where they were named icepick lobotomies, super ineffective and unsafe, and especially unsanitary procedures that would be a tool, most commonly an icepick, being placed through a patient's eye and going through to the brain, and disconnecting certain nerve endings. No anesthesia was used in these procedures either, and we see a character in the novel who has undergone a lobotomy and it completely changes a person's behaviors and mannerisms. I believe if this book took place in more modern t...
Holden Caulfield dislikes a lot of people, and deeply likes a select few. But how does he choose which people make it into which group? I believe he judges people based on their perceived innocence. For example, he dislikes Stradlater because he knows that guy sucks, he's a real piece of work, and believes he can do anything he wants to any woman he wants. He doesn't like that at all, especially when it involves Jane. He perceives her as one of the more innocent people he knows, even though he hasn't actually interacted with her in a while. He wants her to be like how she was back in Maine at their vacation homes, but he doesn't even know if that is what she's actually like now. He is preserving the memory of her innocence, the little things about her that make him actually like her, like keeping her kings in the back row in checkers. The same can be said about the kids he meets after leaving Pencey. The kid singing that he sees is an example of innocence he sees a...
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