Pride In Catcher In The Rye

1953 Words8 Pages
As a high school history teacher at Triton Regional high school, I take great pride in exposing the youth of America to the “darker” side of American history. I do not pursue this task to simply get them depressed about their world. I do this to expose them to reality. If the character Holden Caulfield from J. D. Salinger’s The Cather in the Rye wanted to catch the youth from their fall from innocence, then I want to do the opposite. I want to challenge them with reality. For example, it is a nice elementary school task to learn about Christopher Columbus and his voyage to the New World. Kids are told to respect him as a great and adventurous explorer. I personally take pride in challenging these preconceived notions about Columbus. I tell them many important facts about his voyage. For example, Columbus was not the first European to “find” the New World. He also did not come to the New World because he was on some heroic and noble mission. And lastly, when he got here, he did not engage the native populations in a noble manner. The reality about…show more content…
economic system. The primary goal of The Jungle was to spark a social upheaval, not to expose the horrors within the meatpacking plants. Exposing the horrors was a means to an end. It gave Sinclair the ability to showcase an undeniable fallacy in our economic system. Sinclair was declaring to his readers, look at what capitalism does, it takes advantage of the underprivileged and the unprepared. Writing The Jungle gave Sinclair the ability to use his sensational writing skills to more effectively highlight the problems in the factories. Sinclair also did not trust the newspaper industry in the early nineteen hundreds. He feared censorship from newspaper giants, like William Randolph Hearst, and he feared that they were also corrupted by big business. He did not trust them to effectively broadcast his anti-establishment
Show More
Related

  • Catcher In The Rye Archetypes

    1368 Words  | 6 Pages

    understanding of archetypes as universal, patterns and images that derive from the collective unconscious and are understood by all cultures of having a certain representation or symbolic meaning. In both A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Bugress and Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger, the archetypes of the outsider and entrapment are portrayed through the main character and their journeys. In fact, both novels outsider character archetypes are amplified by the entrapment setting archetype. The character archetype

    Read More

  • Reoccurring Themes In The Great Gatsby

    420 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Great Gatsby consists of themes that connect with novels such as The Catcher in the Rye, The Secret Life of Bees, The Color Purple, and The Crucible. Fitzgerald was able to incorporate themes such as prejudices, self-alienation, and reputations. The Great Gatsby had a reoccurring theme of prejudice towards the lower-class. The people of higher class would consider anyone below them to unfit and treat them inhumanely. For example, Daisy did not marry Gatsby because he had no social class and

    Read More

More about Pride In Catcher In The Rye

Open Document