The Left Age

"If I were a piano player, I'd play in the goddam closet"(110). Holden has a very distinct view of what a phony is. To Holden, all adults are phonies and the only, pure and non-phony people in the society are children. He doesn't want to grow up because he has the fear that he will become a phony. Just like Stephen, he thinks that he is the only person that thinks this way. At the beginning of chapter 13 Holden describes himself in the words, "I'm one of those yellow guys"(115). He doesn't like to get into fights, but instead of him seeing this as a good thing, he sees himself as a coward and as unmanly. I personally admire how he doesn't like to hurt other people because I myself find it hard to confront others and just want everyone to be happy. While those two things aren't the same, there are some similarities. We have to again take into account that the way we view things nowadays is very different than how things were view in the 20...

Throughout the first 4 chapters of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Stephen can be seen regressing back to his younger self's thought of things being black and white. At the end of chapter 3 after he makes his confession he thinks about how it would be good to live or die if God wished it so. When he was a child he would put things in categories to help him keep his world in a pattern he could understand. When it was chapter 5 he began to think in more complex ways. If one person read the first 4 chapters of the book and another person read the 5th chapter they would not think that they were the same person. In the last conversation Stephen has with Cranley, Cranley asks Stephen if he believes in the Eucharist and Stephen's answer is that he neither believes or disbelieves. This further indicates that he now knows that not everything has a right answer. This is different from the first scene where Wells asked Stephen if he kissed his Mother where he tried both answers and ...