Monday, September 22, 2014

What page is the this quote on in the book Catcher in the Rye""Then the carousel started, and I watched her go round and round...All the kids tried...

The quote you're referring to is near the end of the
next-to-last chapter of The Catcher in the Rye, i.e., Chapter 25.
The words start in the middle of the paragraph, so it is easy to miss them. In my
paperback edition the words are on page 211.


readability="8">

Then the carousel started, and I watched her go
around and around. There were only about five or six other kids on the ride, and the
song the carousel was playing was "Smoke Gets In Your
Eyes."



That is a very old
song, popular in the 1920's, along with "Lady Be Good" and "Sophisticated Lady." "Smoke
gets in your eyes" was a kind of metaphor for crying. A person who was crying might deny
it and say some smoke got in his or her eyes. No doubt Holden was crying while he
watched his little sister go blissfully round and round on the carousel. The picture on
the front and back cover of my copy shows a prancing wooden carousel horse--but no doubt
every edition of the book, including the original hard-cover edition, has the same
illustration in red.


The incident seems to symbolize
Holden's departure from childhood. He doesn't care to ride the carousel anymore. He sees
that it is only a carousel and the gold ring is not really gold. He turns that adventure
over to his little sister. He also seems to be abandoning the fantasy of being a rescuer
of children, a catcher in the rye and all. He says:


readability="11">

The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for
the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they
fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to
them.


No comments:

Post a Comment

What is the meaning of the 4th stanza of Eliot's Preludes, especially the lines "I am moved by fancies...Infinitely suffering thing".

A century old this year, T.S. Eliot's Preludes raises the curtain on his great modernist masterpieces, The Love...