Week 2 Homework

When Holden left the train his first thoughts were to give somebody, anybody, a call. He spent about 20 minutes in the phone booth, thinking about who he should call but in the end couldn't decide and rang nobody,  partly because he was worried about the late time, and partly because he didn't want to ring anyone connected to his parents. Instead he caught a cab, once again bringing to his consideration the question of where the ducks go in winter. He asked the cab driver about it, but to no avail, and simply ended up going to a cheap hotel in the city. Shown to his shabby room by a bellboy in similar condition, Holden discovered that the other people staying in the hotel were not the sort of company he would chose to keep. He saw some rather unsightly things from the window of his room. After studying the odd scenarios for a while, Holden's thoughts turned again to Jane, and then to a girl who he had heard of from a Princeton boy, a girl who may have been interested in getting together. He rang up the girl, but she wasn't too happy about it and Holden was left to go out on his own. 

Holden's Goddam War

In the article we learn that the author had written the first few chapters of Catcher as a short story, but when he added them to the book the way it was read changed the readers insight completely. It is interesting the way that Salinger not only changed what he wrote about but the way he wrote and the way he expressed his feelings or rather Holden's feelings in the story. It is also interesting how much of the stories in the book are metaphors for experiences in the authors life. And how these experiences led to the creation of Catcher and the morphing of Holden as a character. It is also very interesting that the author of the article chose to call it Holden's War, this suggests that Holden was fighting the war in his own way along with Salinger, or rather, that their wars were one and the same.