Although sometimes this style of writing can be quite monotonous as many people have found with both Holden and Pip, as we can only see their lives as they see it and how they think we cant see what the other characters in the book are doing or thinking unless Holden and Pip know themselves. The reader cannot see what they want we have to see their lives as they want. Though when reading something written in the first person we can tell that the person who is writing it is still alive. There are of course exceptions to this. As I have seen in The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, as she has decided to write a book from the point of view of a teenager who has died and is telling us their story of their life, and how she can look down from her heaven on the people she left behind getting on with their lives. J.D. Salinger and Dickens have not chosen to write their novels in this way so when we are reading we can tell that the character is not going to die when we get to an enthralling part in the book, so it makes it less exciting for us to read.
When we follow the writer through their life, we can be quite limited in the places we can go and the things we hear, the fictitious writer can only really tell us what they want us to hear. So the view we get from the writer can be quite biased towards them. The actual authors view can become distorted, as they cannot really express their own view on the character. Sometimes the authors can be writing about their own lives just
When comparing Pip and Holden as authors I am also going to be comparing the way that their own authors have made them write their own books.
Both of these books are very different and very similar in many different ways. I am going to be looking at both the differences and the similarities in books and between the two main characters Holden and Pip. Holden can become quite monotonous in his writing and we can almost begin to predict how he feels about things that happen in his life. I think that his favourite phrase must be:
“God that killed me, it really did”.
Sometimes we can even become annoyed with the characters idiosyncrasies like both Holden and Pip. When comparing both of these books and looking at many other books written in the format of a fictitious autobiography I have seen you can write these books in many different ways and formats. We can become very annoyed, as many of us have found as Pip begins to separate himself from his old way of life. It is this way of life that he should really be clinging on to as he is in London as we learn quite early on that no one else is really there t look out for him when he really needs someone.
The font in which a book is written can also have a great effect on the reader as many readers will have their experience of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time shaped by a technical peculiarity of which they might not be conscious. This book uses a sans serif font: that is, a simple kind of print in which letters lack the little tails and plinths that printers call serifs. This is highly unusual in any published book; the conventional wisdom is that serifs help the brain's visual apparatus as a line of print is scanned. The tiny thickenings and thinnings of the limbs of every letter give the eye something to catch on to. A sans serif font is mainly used in advertisements, headlines and the like, but their simplicity is almost physically uncomfortable in any lengthy text.
The font's discomfiting simplicity is perfectly suited to Haddon's narrator, Christopher. This is very similar to Pip as he compares the writing on his parents’ gravestones to what he thinks his parents were like, as he never knew them. He says:
“The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and the turn of the inscription, ‘Also Georgiana Wife of the above,’ I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly.”
Their attitutudes to their own life change dramatically as they grow up in the book. It is this type of genre of book that lets the reader see the author grow up is Bildungsroman. The education that they both go through benefits them both in different ways. With Holden, we can see that it brings him round to realise that he should listen to what advice people try to give him.
I think that the whole purpose of the characters writing their books is so they can write down their thoughts and their feelings about the things and actions they have done. So they can then go back and look at what they put down on paper and perhaps realise how stupid or naive they were. The characters also show that they mature as the book goes on.
The book titles are mentioned rarely within the book. When we have finished reading the books, we can link into the story the titles for both of them. We can see that in Great Expectations, Pip starts out with great expectations about the way he wants to live his life and how he wants people to look at him. Though we can see as his life goes on and he starts to become rather arrogant and annoying as he begins to have shame on his past and the people who have brought him up and cared for him, the people he should have the most respect for. He begins to learn the true values in life are not to have money or to have materialistic ideology but to have integrity and to appreciate family and friends.
Both Pip and Holden form the beginning give out a sense that they do not really know what they want from life or what they want to do. They both seem like lost souls and they both seem to comfort themselves in the fact that if they do something wrong, them it doesn’t matter as they both seem to be disconnected from their parents. Pip because his parents died before he could have any memory of them so the only way he can connect with what they were like is through their gravestone as he says
“As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones.”
Holden on the other hand seems disconnected from his parents not because they have died, as we know they are both alive throughout the whole book but because they are rich and want the best for Holden. We get this impression as he describes the way he acted when his younger brother died; he gives the impression that they did not help him enough. The fact that he is sent off to boarding school is also another factor that we might say that this shows that his parents don’t care about him that much. This of course could be debated as many send their children away to boarding school, as they want the best education for them as a whole person.
Pip and Holden attract the reader by telling them all about things that have happened in their lives. Holden does not tell us everything he has done from the moment he can remember his tale stretches over a year gap with some extra memories coming in from earlier on in his life. Pip tells us a very detailed account of his life, as he seems to think that everything he has done should be written down. It just shows the differences between the writers and the time that they wrote in. Charles dickens was writing in a time that not many people were literate, those who were did not have anything else to do. As he makes Pip say
“For their days were long before the days before photographs”
What they did have was what Pip tells us about: the theatre, horses and carriages, walks in the park, art and music. Pip tells us all about the high life at the time in comparison to his old life which he wanted to leave behind of trying to scrounge a life from a very low wage that he and Joe got from being an apprentice and a blacksmith. He brings us into his tale of his life as Dickens describes everything in great detail. Imagination as William Wordsworth describes in the last stanza of his poem Daffodils:
“For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Detailed description in books now becomes quite trying to the reader as the reader like to have some input into the story by making the story slightly their own through their won imagination. This is why when you begin to watch films of any books most people come away disappointed or with a different take on the story than they had before they had seen the film. This is because the director of a big movie or small film inputs his or her own thought into the book unless the author is there to tell them how to adapt the book to the big screen. This has happened for many in the case of the Harry Potter books in which everyone has there own view on what the characters looked like and how they talked.
They both seem to have problems in the money department. Holden does not seem to be able to keep his money for long periods. He also does not seem to care about whom he takes his money off. He does not really want to take his little sisters money, which she has saved up for months but when the crunch came to the crunch, he did not seem to mind.
Feelings can be very personal to every one of us and sometimes when a character displays strong emotion, we often feel like we are prying into their lives. Both Pip and Holden do not hide their emotions very well through their books though they could hide them from us by simply not telling us, they both choose not to at these points:
Page 160 Chapter 22 from the Catcher and the Rye
And
Page 185 Chapter 19 from Great Expectations
It is from both of threes sections that both of these characters have to leave somewhere and venture out into a place that perhaps neither of them want to go. They both are about to grow up in their on way. In great expectations, Pip is leaving home for the first time to London to meet what he thinks to be his expectations from his mysterious benefactor who little be known to us that we have met before. This is another advantage of fictitious autobiography they can chose whether or not to tell us things that go on. Pip could have told us right at the beginning of the book when we first met Magwich that he was to become his benefactor, paying off the debt he felt he owed to Pip. Pip goes off to London quite unprepared for the big city he puts on his best clothes but he does not take either Jo or Biddy into the High Street to properly see him off. When they throw the old shoes at him, he almost seems grateful that they did not come with him to see him off in the village, as he does not think it appropriate to have old shoes thrown at him in the high street. It is at this point that he is beginning to show the signs of haughtiness and snobbery which grows when he is London which is also quite ironic because when he go to the high street no one was actually there to see them throw a old shoe at him anyway.
In the Catcher and the Rye, we read that Holden has ventured home unbeknown to his parents and is speaking to his sister when they arrive home. When he begins to leave though he started to cry and he says:
“I couldn’t help it. I did it so nobody would hear me, but I did it.”
He goes on to tell us how this show of emotion scared his younger sister phoebe. By telling us, that he did it so nobody would hear him tells us that, he didn’t want to be caught and he was quite embarrassed at the time for crying like a child. I think this because throughout the whole book Holden tries to act older than he is by drinking, smoking and trying to have sex and I think that by doing all of these things it shows us how much he really wants to stay a child at heart.
When he meets Phoebe outside of the museum later on in the book and she has packed her bag ready to run away with him I think this acts as a wake up call to Holden about how stupid he is being and how much he is going to miss. When he does tell “old Phoebe” that he isn’t going away he stops lying and tells the truth to her then he carries on watching Phoebe in the pouring rain going round and round on the carousel with the other parents.
He then takes her money and leaves to his wanderings around New York
In these sections from the books they both are reduced to tears and as boys or young men as we should call them, they are both quite ashamed to admit this point
Again, I am going to refer The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. When Wellington, the pet poodle who lives across the street, is stabbed with a pitchfork and killed, Christopher decides to solve the mystery and write a book about it. Using his favourite novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as his model, he investigates the crime, uncovering many secrets involving his own family in the process. As he applies the lessons which Siobhan has given him for dealing with his overwhelming outside world, he also embarks on a most unusual, if not unique, coming-of-age story, and ends the book a much more mature 15-year-old than he was when he started like both Pip and Holden. Although with both Holden and Christopher, they do not attempt to write down all of their lives as Pip does. They centre their books around a time that they both think had a dramatic change in their lives. Holden tries not to write his book like other authors as he says at the very beginning of the book:
“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all that before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
It is at this point that we begin to see that Holden can be quite contradictory as he then goes on to be a bit like Dickens in his writing as he goes on to describe all about his brother D.B. Just before this he goes into this detail of his life that he tells us were he is writing from:
“I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last
Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.”
So it is at this point that he explains to us that all he really wants to tell us about are the events that lead to him going to what I think is mental hospital. However, through the book he does delve into the past and explains all about the loss of his younger brother and when he smashed all the glass in the garage. This must have been quite a traumatic point in his life and the fact that in punching all the glass out from the windows has left him scarred is quite symbolic. In the sense that when he lost his brother this must of scarred him inside quite deeply this series of events, that he tells us helps us to perhaps understand his actions now. When he is New York, we can see that it is quite a lonely place in retrospect as Holden tells us that when he invited the prostitute back to his room in the hotel all he really wanted to do was to talk to someone. The only way to do this was to hire a prostitute. She of course did not seem to impressed
The endings of both of these books my not be written in the same format but they do have there similarities. Both of the characters end their books in places where they have taken the reader previously in the book. Pip takes us back to Miss Havishams where we also encounter the familiar Estella. Holden on the other hand takes us back to where he started the book, in his place where he is to take it easy. Holden ends his book in a very similar way to how he started it. He says at the beginning of chapter 26 – the very last chapter:
“That’s all I’m going to tell you about. I could probably tell you what I did after I went home and how I got sick and all, and what school I’m supposed to go to next fall, after I get out of here, but I don’t feel like it.”
Like he has done throughout the book he then goes on to contradict himself as he briefly describes what it going on and what he is missing from his old way of life. It is in this chapter that I finally saw how Holden has grown up. I think although I could be wrong I think that now he has told us what has gone on in his life that he will mature more into a better person. I think that Holden even though he is a fictitious character has done very well as a narrator and I had great pleasure in being able to read The Catcher in the Rye.
I also took great pleasure in reading Great expectations with the twists and turns that were in the book, like Estella being the daughter of Magwich's friend the old Convict that makes this Dickens book a true classic. I think overall that both J.D.Salinger and Charles Dickens have made their characters leap out of their pages at us to show us true gentlemen in the true sense who have both grown up and learnt from their mistakes. It is this that makes both Pip and Holden highly successful narrators even if they are fictitious.
