Catcher In The Rye

Run for Your Afterlife
MISSION: UNDERSTAND HOLDEN’S FEARS
Holden Caulfield lies on his back, blinking truth-tainted eyes at a terse blue sky. His fingers knotted in the dew-slicked grass, Holden bites his lip wishing it would bleed, never looking away from the white whispers of clouds that he used to think were lost feathers from the edges of angel’s wings. Actually, there were a lot of things he’d thought about the sky that had been proved wrong recently. For example, rain—Holden had seen rain as the emotion-wrought tears of God, but lately people had been making him believe that the cool droplets were simply another form of misery that battered down on the face of the Earth. Likewise, Holden had always viewed snow as puffs of laughter that floated from angel’s lips; however, mere days ago, society had filled him in that it was just an icy winter weapon to hurl forcefully at the back of a passersby’s head. “What a loser,” the one-dimensional citizens of New York scoff, and shuffle on past him. True, Holden is not the typical hero of a story, not the popular jock or the geek who somehow manages to make his entire life a beautiful sight. No, he doesn’t have it easy. Yes, Holden is twisted, and sometimes he lets himself down, backing down before he’s really accomplished anything. But, in contrast to all of this, the truly admirable quality about him is just how fixated he is on youth and innocence. Though no matter how noble his purposes, Holden truly is lost.   Mirror, mirror, on the wall—who is the most cowardly of them all?   You know you’ve lost when you can’t even look yourself in the eye. Mirrors become your enemies, honesty your fears, and you duck your head to escape from the only thing that really frightens you anymore: your own image. You wake up some mornings in a cold sweat, the expressions of your peers echoing through your mind. You dreamed of them eyeing you haughtily, their faces uniform, their eyes rimmed with disappointment and anger. Their faces...