Compare Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, Ray Kinsella from Shoeless Joe, and Martin Luther King, Jr., a non-violent civil rights activist.

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  The bulk of society has one generalized opinion on how life should be led.  There are some people who reject these opinions and choose to follow their personal opinions, rather than the opinion of their society.  Examples of these people are Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, Ray Kinsella from Shoeless Joe, and Martin Luther King, Jr., a non-violent civil rights activist.  They all chose to follow their own visions to how a life should be led, which is a fundamental to living a fulfilled life.

 In Shoeless Joe, Ray Kinsella rejects the society he lives in.  His society believes that success is having a large house and a great deal of money.  The truth is that people who have attained all of this material wealth are not always happy.  Ray does not care about how much money he has; instead he does what makes him happy.  In Shoeless Joe, Ray’s wife, Annie, says to him, “… If it makes you happy you should do it.”  In this quote, Annie is referring to Ray’s decision to build the baseball field.  That is why Ray did it.  It made him happy.  He took this risk in pursuit of his dream.  He did not care how expensive it would be or how much harder it would be to stay on the farm.  His refusal to sell his farm showed that he had no cares about his financial well being.  Those are worries shared by people who measure success with material wealth.  Mark, Ray’s brother-in-law, is a representation of this society, because he does not know how to attain happiness through anything but material wealth.  

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 In Catcher in the Rye, Holden is like Ray in that he does not agree with society’s values.  However, Holden disagrees with what his society sees as “real.”  The society that Holden lives in sees reality as everything that is superficial, such as what a person wears, what they look like, who they know, everything except who the person actually is.  When Holden goes to see a movie where people were standing in line for hours.  What amazed Holden was that they would stand in line for hours to see something totally fake that makes a spectacle of real life, ...

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