These days our artistic landscape is so deeply defined by visual narratives on TV and in the movies that we can hardly imagine a world without images. Sometimes quality is judged solely based on a stories actions. In this image drenched society we sometimes struggle to appreciate and celebrate books and movies where the quality arises not exclusively from plot but also from the language and characters itself. The novel The Catcher in the Rye written by J. D.
Salinger and the movie Stand by Me directed by Rob Reiner are examples of having uninteresting story line concepts but involving beautifully executed details. The Catcher in the Rye is about a teenager retelling the time when he spent three days in New York and Stand by Me is about a man retelling a story of when he and his friends walked on a railroad track for two days trying to find a dead body. But the weight isn’t in what you see; it’s in what you feel. The Catcher in the Rye and Stand By Me have both stood the test of time, and remain one of those rare pieces of art that show no rust from age. The densely woven human emotion portrayed by the characters, richness of structural design, and impacting ending resolution, are the reasons why these great pieces of art will never lose their relevance. The Catcher in the Rye is the story of Holden Caulfield’s expulsion from Pencey Prep and his journey back home to New York City, where he bums around for a few days while trying to get someone to listen to him and meaningfully respond to his fears about becoming an adult.
Over and over again Holden tries to reach out to people who might tell him that adulthood will be okay – friends, old teachers, a prostitute, a nun, cab drivers – but he can never quite find a way to ask these questions directly and no one ever listens to him anyways. He says “ people never notice anything” (Salinger 116) because he assumes people are too self-involved to pay attention to one another, and more importantly him. Throughout the..
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