Missing Story

The Catcher in the Rye Missing Story
Jordan Kaneshige
Mrs. Shigemitsu - 7:30

Chapter 17
SINCE I DIDN'T want to go I decided to ditch her. I knew she was gonna be really sore about it. But I didn’t care. She probably didn’t care either. I can tell that she didn’t really like me to begin with. She was always looking at other guys and mentioning how she knew them and how this and that person went to the same school as her. But I can still see how she could be sore. Since there was this one time that I it happed to me. No kidding. She was this extremely phony girl, her name was Maya Overton, I was supposed to go to the movies with her to watch this stupid movie about a lady who's husband dies in the war in all, but she didn’t show up. So I went to the movie anyway. It was a good thing too, the movie was just about as phony as she was, it started with them zooming in on this stupid café somewhere in Arkansas where the two of them meet. They fall in love, get married, and have children, all the phony stuff. Then the guy gets drafted to go to war, and the lady makes these really phony tears come out of her eyes when she finds out. So after he goes to war, he gets killed. The lady was super messed up after that, and it ended up that she kills herself at the end of the movie. It was so ridiculous – strictly for phonies. Good thing she didn't come or I would've probably died. So anyway I didn’t really want to go with her so I started walking down to central park to go and see if the ducks came back, when I saw this really big flyer that said, "Big Baseball Game Today – 1 buck!" I thought about going but then I remembered that Allie used to play baseball and that made me depressed, so I kept walking down to the park.
While I was walking I saw this girl that was about Phoebes age dressed in these super old rag looking clothes, she had this old looking coffee can and was singing Home On the Range. I had nothing else to do so I walked up and gave her a nickel. She looked up at me with this face that you could just about get lost in. Her eyes seemed like a brown void.
"Thank you kind sir." She said. That just about killed me. It's like when ever you give a poor person some money they say, "Thank you kind sir, or, god bless you." Its like they want you to feel bad for them or something; what ever it is it damn worked. I felt so bad for her.
"Do you want to go get some hot chocolate?" I said, "There's a shop right across the street an–"
"No, I, I'd like to but I can't."
"That's O.K.," I said – I didn’t want to bother her getting money and all – and I dug in my coat pocket and found a dollar and dropped it in. But the next thing she did just about killed me, she ran up to me as I was walking away and gave me this big hug, then ran off and started singing She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain. Kids are so damn nice. I wish that every one of the adults would learn a thing or two from them. It's like people get phonier as they get older or something; that’s what I pondered as I made my way to the park. Once I got there I walked straight to the pond to go and check on the ducks. On my way I saw this older looking man that was yelling to himself.
"Why'd you do it Marge? Why'd you do it? I told you not to!" He just kept going on… " I told you! Why! Why! – " Just then the Central Park Police man came up to him. I could barley hear their conversation. The policeman said,
" Excuse me sir."
"Why, Marge Why!"
"Excuse me sir." But the man kept on yelling to himself, and he kept walking to. It was \
interesting because the policeman had to keep walking to keep up with him because he wouldn’t stop. The policeman then said something into his radio thing. "Excuse me sir!"
"What do you want!" yelled the man, "Who the hell are you!?" Then he punched the policeman right in the gut. The policeman grabbed his gut, obviously phased by the experience, then grabbed the man. But the guy just started flailing like a dying fish. I decided to walk away though, I don’t know why now, I mean now I think that it was really interesting.
When I got to the pond it wasn't frozen over yet, but there were still a lot of people there. Like there was this one family that the mother and the father were yelling their heads off at each other, while the kid was skipping rocks on the lake. He looked like he was having the time of his life, like he didn’t even know that his parents were at each other's throat, ready to kill each other. There also was this boy that looked lame, I don’t know why but you can tell when someone's lame, its just something that you figure out by yourself. The father was with the boy, holding his hand and walking along the path, stopping to look at interesting things in the grass. That’s another thing that gets me, when your he person that’s looking at the grass its really interesting, but if your looking at a person that’s looking at the grass, you think, "Why the hell are they looking at the grass?" Anyway, I started to get a little bored so I sat down on this bench. The bench had this big question mark on it that for some reason got me thinking. I thought about who wrote it and what it might mean. I eventually settled on a story that went something like this. This small young boy with his mom, and his mom didn’t want him to go and play near the lake because she thought it was too dangerous but the boy kept nagging her.
"Mom, please, I just want to go and see the fish." But the mom would reply.
"No, you can't go, I don’t know how deep it is and I don’t want you falling in." Just by coincidence there was a blue crayon next to him and he drew a big question mark on the bench. I really don’t know why I thought of that but, I did.
Then I remembered why I went there, for the ducks. I looked and they weren’t there. I was disappointed. I remember when Allie asked me whether I knew where the ducks went and I promised him I would find out. I never did, I never came through with my promise though, that is before he died. I was feeling pretty depressed, so I just sat there and looked out on the lake, at the lame boy, at the parents fighting, at the boy skipping the rocks on the lake, and I thought about Allie.

Analysis

I DECIDED to write a substitute for chapter seventeen. My story is about Holden walking to and through central park to go and see if the ducks are still there. On the way he meets some peculiar people. These people to me are a foreshadowing, or some type of analogy or mirror of Holden's life, or what he feels. Each situation in the story that I created related to a certain problem or experience that Holden had had or is going to have. Since J.D. Salinger likes to play so much with foreshadowing and analogies, I decided to target that in my story. Holden has a lot of problems that J.D. has in his character. The girl that he met on the street was supposed to show Holden's love for children and the fact that he likes them more than he likes adults. Its as if he thinks that they haven’t turned into phonies yet, that they are still innocent and that they have less worries that most people do, especially him. So in a way, Holden wishes that he to were a child. The he could just turn back into a care free child that gets to play and go on field trips to the museum with friends. Holden seems to be a lost person, and he seems to find his identity within children, and what they do.
They next part of the story has the crazed man that is yelling "why" I thought that the man was foreshadowing what Holden was going to become, what's in store for him when he becomes an adult. I believe that Holden would be yelling, "why" if he were in his shoes, because he would be questioning why nobody was his Catcher in the Rye. Why nobody saved him from falling off the cliff and turning into a crazy. The fact is that many people have tried and failed. It seems as though Holden seems as though he is alone, that nobody cares about him, but that is wrong.
The last part of my story is about the families that Holden sees in the park. I don’t really know why I put in the particular families I did, I was just writing what came to mind. But the lame child to me seems to be like Holden, and the father that is holding his hand is Phoebe. Holden always calls Phoebe, Old Phoebe, he seems to look up at her and see her as a person wise for their age. Well it seems to me that Phoebe seems to be the basis of Holden's moves and ideas, and is usually considered in his actions. So in effect Phoebe is leading Holden throughout life. The other family that I portrayed was the one with the fighting mother and father. The people that are fighting is life itself in Holden's eyes, problems, money, relationships, and the fighting couples child just simply ignores them and their fighting. This to me is another reason why Holden wishes he could be a child, that he wishes that the world would just melt away and all that was bad wouldn’t matter anymore.
At the very end I have him talk about Allie, I end with him going over all that he can see and have him end thinking about it all, I want the reader to wonder what he is thinking about, and keep the mystery of the book that J.D. so well portrays alive.