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Essay / Social Classes in The Catcher and the Rye - 1862
I'm waiting at my roommates' apartment here in Canton - I live there too. I'm strapped for cash while waiting for my care box (a box full of food and treats) and an envelope full of money from my parents. I'm a student – and I depend on my parents for money and everything else – well, for the most part. So I don't want to eat a lot of my roommates' food, because he already allows me to stay here practically for free, even if I pay. I'm looking through my last box of presents to see if I can find anything. I found some sardines. If you know anything about sardines, you know that they have this unbearable smell and in most cases you will have to clean the entire house with a huge amount of bleach to eradicate the smell. And it is also generally a poor class cuisine because of its cheapness. So I eat. Marcus eats too. He eats a huge steak – a steak from the Texas Road House – a restaurant with pretty authentic Texan food – I say a little because I'm not exactly sure what authentic Texans eat – he got the steak for free because of Veterans Day. Marcus of course offers me a piece. I delightfully reject his offer. And he finally gets into this whole spiel about what I expect from him when he eats steak and I eat sardines for dinner. The first thing I think is that the amount of money my parents send is probably more than he makes in a six month period, but I still feel like I'm quickly spending it on fast food and anything else. Even though my family is wealthy, I would always happily eat a piece of steak that I wanted a piece of, but I didn't want them to know I wanted a piece. The catcher and the rye express this same social class and also he dares to overthrow them. When it...... middle of paper ...... we go through society following all the rules and live a life full of mundane activities. Holden realizes that there are no rules in life: you can do whatever you want. Everyone wanted to be confined, labeled, marked, but Holden didn't necessarily want to stand out but he didn't want to be as sane as everyone else. Morality is something you can use to be your compass of judgment – it turns out that Holden didn't choose himself as an adult, or as a society, or as a social class. He lives beyond the limits of labels and has created a melting pot. he saw logos and he did everything in his power to bring them down – he wanted it to be balanced even if it had a lot of contradictions, he knew that life spent in the shadows of society was equivalent to a drone – even to death. On several occasions, he risked his own well-being for the dismantling of the hierarchy. “If moralism, judgment