I love Catcher in the Rye! I detailed some of my opinions on Holden and the book itself in last week’s post. This week in class, though, we got around to reading our edits of Catcher in the Rye aloud. The project was to transform the dialogue and narration into ‘modern speech’, which I would say everyone succeeded in. Surprisingly, we managed to get through everyone in one class… I was definitely expecting to need to go past the class time to read everyone’s versions.

Some people in class are better speakers than others, but as far as content goes, I think we hit the nail on the mark. There was constructive criticism, of course– but we definitely fulfilled the requirement, and even did excellently in some cases. I loved Monica’s rendition because it genuinely sounded like it was her. TJ’s also made me burst out laughing; he has a ‘North Shore’ english that’s different from the rest of us and it’s really humorous to hear in such a concentrated form.

I, myself, was encouraged to change certain aspects of Holden’s thought process, such as referring to Stradlater (I did chapter 4) as ‘hot’. The reason I wrote it originally as such is because I feel as though Catcher in the Rye has some minor bisexual subtext that a lot of teenagers nowadays wouldn’t hide, especially in their own thoughts, even if they were as insecure as Holden is. In the book, Holden also does just think stuff like ‘Stradlater is good looking’ at the most random of times (like right after talking about Jane being abused… what the heck, Holden?), but I did re-edit it because I saw Dr. Kahan’s point in class that Holden is a confused adolescent who might not mean things in those terms.

All in all, it was a fun assignment that showed us that though the way we convey our thoughts changes, the meanings underneath do not.