From Chapter 17 – dialogue between Holden and Sally Hayes
Then, all of the sudden, I got this idea.
“Here’s my idea. How would you like to get the hell out of here? Here’s my idea. I know this guy down in Greenwich Village that we can borrow his car for a couple of weeks. He used to go to the same school I did and he still owes me ten bucks. What we could do is, tomorrow morning we could drive up to Massachusetts and Vermont, and all around there, see. It’s beautiful as hell up there. It really is.” I was getting excited as hell, the more I thought about it, and I sort of reached over and took old Sally’s goddam hand. What a goddam fool I was. “No kidding,” I said. “I have about a hundred and eighty bucks in the bank. I can take it out when it opens in the morning, and then I could go down and get this guy’s car. No kidding. We’ll stay in these cabin camps and stuff like that till the dough runs out. Then, when the dough runs out, I could get a job somewhere and we could live some¬where with a brook and all and, later on, we could get married or something. I could chop all our own wood in the wintertime and all. Honest to God, we could have a terrific time! Wuddaya say? C’mon! Wuddaya say? Will you do it with me? Please!”
“You can’t just do something like that,” old Sally said. She sounded sore as hell.
“Why not? Why the hell not?”
“Stop screaming at me, please,” she said. Which was crap, because I wasn’t even screaming at her.
“Why can’tcha? Why not?”
“Because you can’t, that’s all. In the first place, we’re both practically children. And did you ever stop to think what you’d do if you didn’t get a job when your money ran out? We’d starve to death. The whole thing’s so fantastic, it isn’t even — ”
“It isn’t fantastic. I’d get a job. Don’t worry about that. You don’t have to worry about that. What’s the matter? Don’t you want to go with me? Say so, if you don’t.”
“It isn’t that. It isn’t that at all,” old Sally said. I was be¬ginning to hate her, in a way. “We’ll have oodles of time to do those things — all those things. I mean after you go to college and all, and if we should get married and all. There’ll be oodles of marvelous places to go to. You’re just-”
“No, there wouldn’t be. There wouldn’t be oodles of places to go to at all. It’d be entirely different,” I said. I was getting depressed as hell again.
“What?” she said. “I can’t hear you. One minute you scream at me, and the next you — ”
“I said no, there wouldn’t be marvelous places to go to after I went to college and all. Open your ears. It’d be entirely different. We’d have to go downstairs in elevators with suitcases and stuff. We’d have to phone up every¬body and tell ‘em good-by and send ‘em postcards from hotels and all. And I’d be working in some office, making a lot of dough, and riding to work in cabs and Madison Avenue buses, and reading newspapers, and playing bridge all the time, and going to the movies and seeing a lot of stupid shorts and coming attractions and newsreels. Newsreels. Christ almighty. There’s always a dumb horse race, and some dame breaking a bottle over a ship, and some chimpanzee riding a goddamn bicycle with pants on. It wouldn’t be the same at all. You don’t see what I mean at all.”
Step 1
- Carefully read the passage (several times?).
- Divide relatively equally into ten and respond to the bold section from one of the analytical perspectives below.
- In the comments to this post, indicate which of the analytical perspectives was the most revealing for this passage.