A journey into madness

I chose the play Long days journey into night by Eugene O'neil as my play to read for this assignment. It is the kind of play I would have rather watch on a theatre than read it myself, I think I would have been able to enjoy it way more than I actually did.

The play is about a very tragic, depressing and stresful day on the life of a very particular family, the Tyrone's, in which nothing seems to be alright. We go through the day of the mother, Mary Tyrone, a drug user who has long been fighting her addiction and who decided that that day was the perfect day for a relapse. The day of the father, James Tyrone, a men who used to be a famous actor and that now lives out of buying properties and the income they may bring, trying to spend as little money as possible to reach his goals and solve his and his family's needs. The day of Jamie Tyrone, the eldest son of the couple, a known alcoholic and whore addict with no aspirations. The day of Edmund Tyrone, the youngest son, who is very weak and ill, and has to face the diagnosis of a sickness that could kill him. 

The day starts with a conversation, the first of many, in which Mary pretends that she has not started taking morphine again while her husband and sons suspect that she has, and this is pretty much how the whole play will work. All the juicy parts, such as the trip to town, the doctor's appointment that Edmund has to attend, Mary taking drugs, etc, happens behind the courtain and we are not there to enjoy it, we just get all the nagging and fighting that happens on pretty much all their conversations.

In a world where we all expect to read about are happy succesful families, reading this play is really an adventure into madness. The writer is a genious when it comes to making us feel what the characters are feeling. For example when, after a long day, Edmund and James come back from their trip to the town and meet Mary, and start talking about her going to the drugstore with Catleen and says:

Mary:

Her face hardenng stubbornly

Know what? That I suffer from rheumatism in my hands and have to take medicine to kill te pain? Why should be ashamed of that?

She then goes ahead and blames her addiction on Edmund being born, to what Tyron replies...

Tyron:

Don't mind her, lad. It does not mean anything. When she gets to the stage when she gives the old crazy

excuse about her hands she's gone far away from us.

At that point of the play I was screaming for Mary to get a grip and admit that she has started to take morphine again, Tyrone must have been so frustrated, because even though we could see a lot of fighting and pointing fingers, the love he felt for her I believe was deep, noone who does not love endures as much as him, same goes for her children, they expected her to get get better, but I guess they'll have to keep waiting.

As part of the adventure we are in while reading the play we realize that the Tyrone family is far away from being the image we all expect about what a family living the american dream would be. 

As Laurence Farlengetti writes on his poem

The poet’ 

s eye obscenely seeing

sees the surface of the round world

          with its drunk rooftops

          and wooden oiseaux on clothesliens

          and its clay males and females

          with hot legs and rosebud breasts

          in roll away beds

and its trees full of mysteries

and its Sunday parks and speechless statues

and its America

         with its ghost towns and empty Ellis Islands

and it's surrealist landscape of

                          mindless prairies

                          supermarket suburbs

                          steamheated cemeteries

                          cinerama holy days

                          and protesting cathedrals

a kissproof world of plastic toiletseats tampax and taxis

         drugged store cowboys and las vegas virgins

         disowned indians and cinemad matrons

         unroman senators and conscientious non-objectors

and all other fatal shorn-up fragments

of the immigrant's dream come too true

    and mislaid

               among the sunbathers

Life in America is not only about big mansions and expensive top of the class cars, there are other realities, there are Tyrone families all over the place where the wife was not married to a rich guy to be the perfect housewife of, but married for love to an actor, which by then was not well seen by the society of the time.

There are people like James Tyron who are so cheap that rather send his son to the worst hospital there is, and pay for the cheapest accommodations as long as he is able to save money, no matter the cost. Not everyone lived a  life made of plastic, ask Edmund about it!.

What to do when there's nothing left for you

Life is a series of events; we adapt ourselves to the different scenarios, the different people, and different situations. We grow up and as we grow we learn, we find our own way in life, we decide what we want and what we don’t want, and every decision we make has its consequences.

Death of a Salesman is a play about a middle class family whose characters are more complex than what we can see at the beginning, we get to see the last days of William Loman, and we get to know the members of his family and the shadows that each one of them has, as a short description of each of them I would say that William is a depressed man beaten by the world, frustrated of the life he made, frustrated because all that he dreamed of never came true, and at this point he is tired of living. Linda is the woman who’s always been there for his husband, the perfect housewife that can’t stand the weight of his husband losing himself, on her shoulders, but she tries every day until the moment of his suicide. Biff, at first I thought he was a complete failure, and although he is, in a way, he ended up being the one I think has the best values, he respects his mother even though she doesn’t treats him well, and blames him all the time for the state of his father, he faces his brother Happy when he realizes that he could do something for his father, economically but he doesn’t, and he forgives his father for what he did to his mother and humiliates himself in one of the last scenes, for love. Happy is the boy who was always in the shadow of his brother, he became more successful than his brother and he doesn’t care about his father at all, I think that’s because his father always ignored him while he was a kid and kept on ignoring his success when he grew up.

William, an old man in an ever changing world, an old man who can’t find his place in the world he’s living in, and worst, he can’t find happiness in the family he built. We slowly discover through the play, Death of a Salesman, who William is, what his dreams were, his frustrations, his mistakes, etc.

Unlike what William would have wanted he’s not a well liked character for the readers, but I think that it’s easy to understand why he behaves the way he does. His memories always bring back the moments in which he made the worst decisions, the moments that remind him how different life would have been if he had made other decisions. The realization of all this sunk him in depressing feelings that took him into this irreversible state, death.

The past is highly important for William, because in the past his life was a successful life and he is so attached to keep his life as close as it was in the past, except that everyone and everything around him changed, we see this even in the smallest details of the dialogues in the play, for example the following dialogue:

LINDA (trying to bring him out of it): Willy, dear, I got a new kind of American-type cheese today. It’s whipped.

WILLY: Why do you get American when I like Swiss?

LINDA: I just thought you’d like a change...

WILLY: I don’t want a change! I want Swiss cheese. Why am I always being contradicted?

LINDA (with a covering laugh): I thought it would be a surprise.

WILLY: Why don’t you open a window in here, for God’s sake?

LINDA (with infinite patience): They’re all open, dear.

WILLY: The way they boxed us in here. Bricks and windows, windows and bricks.

There we not only see that he doesn’t like change, but also we see that he misses the past in which he didn’t felt boxed by the buildings around his house, he misses the times when the sun shone over his house. Unfortunately, that’s not the only thing that is not going as he expected.

The title of the play says it all and spoils too, William is dead before he kills himself, his dreams are buried, at some moments it seems to be a chance to keep on dreaming but everything goes from bad to worse, the job he thought was the most beautiful job in the world has betrayed him, he can’t sell anymore, people don’t like him anymore, nobody knows him anymore, and he can’t even bring money home, he’s not receiving an appropriate payment and he has to borrow money from his friend Charlie all the time, as I said before William was dead before he killed himself. The final decision was inevitable, his last day was a disaster, he got fired, he humiliated himself not to get fired, his son disappointed him again, and he remembered when he cheated on his wife. 

The Woman alike the other characters that came from the past, tormented him. She took him back to the moment he failed his son, to the moment he destroyed the life of Biff and although he never admits it, he knows he’s guilty of the failure his son became. 

Suicide presents itself in the form of characters inviting him to different moments that will take him to death, and he attempted many times to commit it. The same happens in the poem of Anne Sexton, Wanting to Die

…and yet she waits for me, year after year,

to so delicately undo an old wound,

to empty my breath from its bad prison

Death came to William delicately always as a memory, always kind at the beginning but with the intention to open old wounds until William had no more chance than listen to the voices and follow them. In the poem Anne also talks about many attempts to commit suicide, but what did William had left if there was not even a William anymore? Being a Salesman was all he was and in the world he lived in, he couldn’t be himself anymore, there was no room for an old salesman, he was a dreamer with no more dreams. Not even his death gave him back some honor, Linda couldn’t believe that only a few people showed up for his funeral, and if William could have witness his own funeral, it would have break him even more.

Going back to the poem Anne Sexton writes:

But suicides have a special language.

Like carpenters they want to know which tools.

They never ask why build.

During the play Linda reveals that William has a set of options with which he could kill himself, tools, but can we say he really knew why he wanted to be death? I think William followed the voices, the special language suicide used with him, the memories. But until the very end of the play he was amazed by life, the fact that Biff cried to him was a happy event for William and then, he committed suicide?  I think each reader would have his explanation to William’s decision, in my opinion  it was an unconscious decision,  I think death seduced him in so many ways that he could no longer differentiate reality from fantasy and in his lost mind he followed the wrong path.

The play has many other points to analyze but I chose to focus on death because in this play it does not only mean physical death, but also the death of dreams and the death of hope.

 Every day we make decisions that will shape ourselves and shape our and other’s future, and with each big decision there is one path that we choose to take and another path that we choose to set aside, there will always be a part of past that might come back and shove our bad decisions in our face, let’s not allow those ghosts from the past lead us to death. 

Contradictions

How can I begin analyzing The Catcher in the Rye and then relating it with a current event? From where do I start?

I could start by presenting a summary of the plot but this has already been done in almost all of my classmates' entries, and what I’m really interested in is in Holden’s behavior and what is behind him. 

Regarding his behavior, many book reviewers have claimed that Caulfield is a whiny, hypocrite and hateful character. Well, here is where I disagree since Holden is just an adolescence, who has lost a brother and who presents some symptoms of a mental illness. We can’t judge Holden just because he acts different from his peers. For this reason is that I want to analyze some important concepts and events presented in the book regarding Holden in order to understand him. 

Concerning the stage of adolescence that he is passing through, he shows the typical behavior: he hates adults, he moves away everyone that approaches him but then he realized that he still need that person, he is afraid of growing up and he wants independency but he is not so sure about it. For this reason, is that this book is considered to make an entire generation feel identified with it: it portrays the feelings and the situations that adolescents pass. Moreover, when I read it I immediately remember the book The Unbearable lightness of being by Milan Kundera, where it is stated that:

“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”

Meaning that, when we are passing a difficult time, we go back to our childhood, to our happy and peaceful moments and we wish to just stay there. When Holden felt depressed or lonely he remembered the old times whit his brother and for that reason he may not want to grow up. Indeed, he said that:

“The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move.”  

Moving on to his mental illness, this is not explicitly mentioned in the text but in many occasions he has been asked to visit a psychoanalyst or he has considered himself as a depressive person. 

“ I was only thirteen, and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don't blame them. I really don't. I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn't do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it, and you didn't know Allie.”

With this passage we can infer that the mental breakdown he suffers at the end of the book is related to the death of his brother. Having in mind that he is not mentally stable, how we can judge him? How we ask Holden to be mature and without contradictions? 

As it can be noted, Holden is mainly defined as a character full of contradictions. But aren’t we all just like Holden?

If we look at our society, we can realize that there are many Holden out there or many contradictions that all of us make. Few days ago, there was a case in which two men killed a criminal who was trying to steal their car. It was a new “detención ciudadana” but ending with a dead men. Some said it was the right thing to do if someone steals something of yours or if someone is breaking into your house, you have to take justice into your own hands. So… where is the contradiction? If we asked the same people that is in favor of this “detención ciudadana” what she/he thinks about abortion, they probably mention that it is agains the law and their beliefs, that is a human being that deserves to live. I know that the situations are different and that the criminal was making something against the law, but why do we perceive differently the lives of a criminal and a fetus? Is one of them more important than the other? Why the criminal deserves to die? 

We are full of contradictions; our society is full of them. The difference is that we are not adolescents; we are adults.

Judged by our own decisions

When reading The Catcher in the Rye a lot of things may come to your mind since it is a book that it can relate to many current situations that our society is facing.  For instance, we can compare Holden's contradictions throughout the whole book, with the contradictions of daily life regarding controversial topics such as abortion and homoparental adoption. In chile, there is a relation between these two topics, for example, some people are against abortion, so they claim the baby is not guilty of the sins of the mother, thus deserving to live. Then if the baby is left for adoption and a homoparental couple want to raise the baby, they are discriminated by the same people who was in favor of  giving the baby an oportunity of a better life.

We can also relate the need of company and at the same time the need for loneliness expressed in the book. Many people get easily irritated because of the stress caused by work, thus wanting to be completely alone in order to function properly for job; but at the same time, the only  moment when they feel happy is when they have no workload and can share with their beloved ones. 

Additionally,  the need of growing up at a younger age. Holden, who is just 16 is pushed to grow up and make responsible and adult decisions, just like students are pushed to do after they leave highschool.

The Catcher in the Rye is a novel  you may never completely understand, especially because  Holden's inestability in thoughts. When you first approach the book you may feel a little bit confused by his attitud about life and at people sorrounding him. However, when you go deep into the narration, you realised that his attitude starts to make sense, at least to my mind. 

From my point of view, Holden gets so touched for the death of his little brother Allie, and by the death of one of his classmates, that he came to believed that life is so fragile and light that you can dissappear at any possible moment.

The possible age in which Holden was completely happy, was a long time ago, when he was a child and his little brother was alive. So that's maybe why he is so attached to childhood. 

If life is so fragile, and you can disappear at any given moment, why you have to stop being "happy" and grow up?. Why do you have to become a "mature" person?. Why do you have to start thinking about your future when you're just about 16 years old?  Why you can't remain happy in the place you want to stay? That's probably one of the questions that the book leaves up to us (at least from my perspective).

Holden is just a boy that has so much pressure over his shoulders by people around him. He is supposed to perform better at school, to behave like a boy of his age, to think about his future, to stay away from his parents during school, etc. He is supposed to be an adult, but an adult of 16 years old? It is obvious that he needs to make a transition from childhood to adulthood, but maybe he is just not prepare, and he doesn't deserve to be criticized for not being ready. Anyway, even when he doesn't like adults and everything that it implies, in some cases he tries to be one, he tries to be interested in adult stuffs, such as alcohol, cigarrets, sex. He may also feel pushed to not be always surrounded by people, to be independent. He really tries to be mature,  even though when sometimes he come back to his perfect childish fantasy life. He tries so hard to be like an adult,  that  he fails, and ended up in a restroom because of getting sick.

Considering this tiny little summary of a part of Holden's life (from my point of view) I want to focus on the transition that Holden is suppossed to do from childhood to adulthood and compare it to our chilean educational system. 

As well as Holden, students from highschool are supposed to become adults at a very younger age, almost the same age that Holden (16) in order to start an adult life at the age of 18. Chilean highschool students are pushed to become adults as fast as possible. The transition made from higschool life to university life is almost inexistent inside the our context. Students, who were used to live with their parents, who were used to be considered "too young" to take some desicions; in a very short period of time, have to become responsible adults. They face a complete different reality at university; new house, professor, environment, house, classmates and so on. As they are supposed to succeed in this new life, they have to adopt the posture of a  grown up in order to fill the society expectations, in which you need to attend  university to get better life opportunities.

Just  as Holden, chilean highschool students may realised and try to accomplish the task of becoming adults, but for some of them this will not be as easy as it sounds or it won't happen. I personally believe that most of the dropouts of university students in Chile is because they were pushed to fill the society expectations of deciding at a very young age what to do with their lives, and when they were finally living according through this decision, they realize it was not what they really wanted. In this sense, the highschool-university transition is not completed since students refused to get done this process at that expected age. So maybe that's why some students fail subjects more than one time or didn't finish their programms in the amount of time they are suppossed to get finished. Some others just quit studying at university, because they may not feel prepared to make such an important decision, and our society needs to understand that it is okey. Even though they may be critisize for being "adults" in terms of age and still being dependent of his parents, they will make a decision later on, and they will have the opportunity to start all again, just as Holden at the end of the book. Even if the end of book feels kind of incomplete, we get to the clue that he will made a decision about his life, no matter if it is a  good one such as keep going in his life and finally complete the childhood-adulthood transiition, or a more bad/tragic one, remaining in his childhood fantasy forever (and yes, with this means that he kills himself).

Still, there are some questions that came to my mind while reading and getting to what I have written...why do we feel so pushed by society to do what we are expected to do? why if someone is not ready yet to make these school-university transition at 25 or even at early 30? Is there really a need to fill the expectations of external people when we are supposed to be the owners of our life?

Catcher in the Rye

I am going to start saying that I had to reread a lot of parts in order to understand it; I am not going to lie about it. I believe I didn’t like it because I didn’t get every word, motif and symbol until I made a little research on it. I must say that the way it is written just bothered me, and the lead character was just as bothersome as it. So the only thing I wanted to do was to finish reading it (to end my agony).

As ‘we’ discussed in class the story is written from Holden Caulfield’s point of view. He doesn’t tell the story in a way that makes sense but in the way he feels it. And I have never hated a character as much as I hated Caulfield while reading. Although I could feel a kind of proximity while I was reading, and the way he expresses himself was a very relaxed one, it felt like I was sitting next to an old man complaining about things that are just normal. Also, the constant use of certain phrases “and all” just got me fed up. Or maybe I just “didn’t feel like” listening to an ordinary man’s story of life. You know? You just can do this kind of stuff if you feel like it.

HOWEVER, I must admit that this novel is not only about a cynic teenager complaining about people being as phony as him. It is deeper than that. This is about a ‘kid’ going through what we call adolescence. He knows he is growing up, and he knows he is going to be part of this horrible adult world where everybody is fake as hell. In fact, I think he already has been caught by this ‘evil adult world’, because he is always lying and pretending to be something he is certainly not. “I am the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life” he said when he lied to ‘old Spencer’ when he wanted o leave in order to avoid the lecture that was coming. He did the exact thing he hates about older people.  Then we have this part when he meets Ernest Morrow’s mother in the train. Again he lies, telling her a false name. The list of Caulfield’s lies continues, but I don’t want to talk about every single lie he told. I just want to point out the fact that he contradicts himself in so many ways. He realizes that he is a big liar, but he keeps on lying. I remember that in class we analyzed this and we came to the conclusion that the author wanted say that it is OK to be contradictory. And it is true! Human beings are always contradicting themselves. Sometimes you need to be contradictory in order to discover new truths, new ways.

He knew he was turning into a phony person. He knew he was ‘lost’ in that way, he couldn’t revert that. Here is when the catcher in the rye symbol appears. When he is talking with Phoebe, and she asks him what he likes, what he would like to be. He remembers this Robert Burns’ poem that, according to Caulfield, said “If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye”. He next explains he wants to catch all the kids that are about to fall for a cliff in the rye. He wanted to prevent children becoming adults, and losing their purity. That’s why he gets scandalized when he sees ‘Fuck you’ written near Phoebe’s school. He didn’t want his sister or any kid to be ‘perverted’. He wanted to do what he couldn’t do with himself.

"If a body catch a body comin' through the rye"

It is kind of sad that he wanted to do that. Because people need to grow up, they need to face things even if they are not good. They need to learn how to live, and the only way to do so is to be exposed to the real world. His ‘dream’ was kind of impossible, and the most vivid example was him. Even though he didn’t want to become an adult, he had already been ‘corrupted’ by the world, because it is a process (an unavoidable process).

Catcher in the rye has a lot of meaningful passages. I think I should have read it when I was younger. I didn’t really like it when I first read it, because of Caulfield constant whining.  But once I finished it I said to myself this couldn’t be about just a boy ‘crying’ over everything. And I went to YouTube and other Web sites so I could understand what I had read. To my surprise, I ended liking it a little more. I liked how it is a novel that can make you realize that time passes and you can’t control it. We all must grow and turn into phony monsters!

While I was writing this post I couldn't stop thinking about a song of one of my favorite bands. I find it really appealing to Holden Caufileld's character. I will leave the link so you can watch it and comment on it!