You Are a Ghost (Probably)

            You awake in a cold sweat to discover that your skin is transparent. Rather, more than skin- your entire body is transparent. Though you take first few moments of consciousness in strides, you quickly succumb to panic. You leap from your bed, a disheveled mess of mismatched sheets, a moistness seeping into the mattress. Upon landing on the floor, you look down and witness yourself standing inside your friend, Clydas, who appears to be perfectly content. Scanning your surroundings reveals a few of your other friends: Ted, Wu, and Reed. All four guests are sprawled out in various, visually uncomfortable positions, filled with all manner of substances and dead asleep. You hastily step out from inside Clydas’s ribcage and stumble for the door across the room. Each step brings the unfamiliar feeling of absolutely nothing at all. You walk through dirty clothes, wrappers, and friends, and each time experience zero contact. Unfortunate, you think. And confusing.

            When you reach your bedroom door, you grab for the handle and lean your body forward, out of a habit of being able to physically manipulate the world around you. However, you once more fail to touch anything. In an exhilarating, heart-attack inducing moment of surprise, you fall through the door.

            You lie in the hallway outside your bedroom for a few seconds, and arrive at the logical conclusion that you are a ghost. All the observable evidence points squarely to your sudden transformation into a non-corporeal spirit. The revelation should carry some amount of weight for your youthful, life-yet-to-live mind. But the hour is late, you can barely see, are mildly hungry, and need to take a leak. You rise up off the carpet-stained hallway in order to address your problems, in order of bodily necessity. An intense mental debate takes place, whereby you mutter unintelligibly to yourself and squint really, really hard. Arriving at the conclusion that even if you are a ghost you must still need to piss (perhaps ectoplasm), you launch yourself back through the bedroom door and towards your bathroom.

            Gliding is beginning to seem less utterly disturbing, and you glibly slide through the meat-bags you once called friends. Yet as you reach the precipice of your bathroom, passing by your bed, you notice another cause for alarm. Your corpse, grotesquely wrapped in multi-colored sheets, emits a great snore. You realize that your body is alive, sleeping, soundly absorbed in whatever drug-fueled adventure his subconscious has prepared for him. You mourn the loss of your brief ghostly existence and begin struggling for a new, probably more complicated explanation. The entire situation is unfortunate; being a ghost would be a pretty good gig.

            Clydas abruptly bursts from his mat on the floor, drooling more so than normal. You watch as he shakes his gritty hair into long black strands and begins to stand up. At first, you fear for his safety and rush to catch him as he loses his balance. But Clydas is a lucky jerk, capable of stumbling out of whatever he happens to fall into. Though he passes through your immaterial hands, he catches himself on the edge of your mattress before crashing through the window. A sigh of relief escapes you, and then the world seems to crash in on itself.

            The walls about you begin to melt, rock, and twist. The ceiling falls through you and into you, becoming the floor. Even the air itself seems to undulate with reckless energy. You feel like you have been thrown into an unholy hybrid of an M.C Escher and Salvador Dali painting. Reality is taking a break and letting the universe play whatever sick games it desires. The current state of the room offends you greatly and you try to fathom the forces at work as you claw at your phantasmal eyeballs and scream into the night.

            It is exactly when Clydas begins to shake your dead-but-sleeping self that everything lurches into elucidation.

A few rough jolts of your shoulders send out a pulse. You, standing at the edge of the room, straining to differentiate the door from the wall, receive an immediate tug. The sensation flows through your ghostly shoulders, as if they were made of sinewy flesh. By this point, a roaring has blown into your ears, like an outrageous waterfall or static white noise.  Concurrently, you are pulled through space towards the mattress while deafening noise twists your thoughts. The walls have yet to cease their malformation and the sound in the room has begun to take on a peculiar quality, as if someone is shouting to you twenty-feet underwater. You pause your mental anguish for just long enough to watch as you are tossed headfirst into your body on the mattress.

A dark abyss greets you. Then you open your eyes. Groggily, you shift your head from side to side, and arrive at the conclusion that someone is shaking you. Looking up from the sheets, you behold Clydas, your oily, unshaven partner-in-delinquency. Once your ears begin to function, you hear the garble of white noise soften and crystallize into Clydas’s pestering please. The walls appear to be obeying any and all laws.

“Dude, dude, dude,” Clydas drones to you, “Dude, I’m so starving right now.”

“Ta gitsh sezin tedeet” you reply, but something about the statement felt awkward in your mouth. Pushing Clydas away with an unfriendly shove, you lean up amidst your sheets and rub your jaw. You pull your bottom lip down, massage your gums, and try to consider what speaking English feels like.

“Then get some thing to eat” you reply again, this time more confidently. When Clydas makes a gesture of confusion, you point out the various bags of whatever processed junk is scattered around the room. Sulking but satisfied, Clydas crawls off, leaving you to reflect on your experiences.

The allure of delving into your out-of-body escapade sets your mind on an energetic track. You almost feel a potential coursing through your veins, through your muscles and organs and synapses. You could make a painting, compose a song, write a novel to convey the mysteries which you just endured. Though you are sitting in a dark, damp, roach-laden suburbia, surrounded by comatose friends, the world grows just a little bit brighter for you. But suddenly the substances in your body kick back in and you fall asleep. Lights out.  

You guess the adventure can wait.

The Catcher in the Rye Reaction: Two Sides of a Coin?

  Holden Caulfield is a tragic character in that he embodies the very thing he hates: phoniness. Throughout the Catcher in the Rye, Holden struggles to accept the world he lives in, rejecting what he perceives as a society of fake personas, self-serving liars, and shallow fools. The author of the novel, J.D Salinger, writes a very understandable teenage character, as Holden provides a voice to the internal conflict of identity that all people experience in maturity. Particularly, Salinger writes Holden as a rebel, a fighter of the system which he perceives. The resulting narrative provided by Holden is both admirable and lamentable; Holden works against fallacies he views in society while simultaneously failing to realize his own faults.

  Teenagers often strive to protect and nurture (and often project) their own identity. Holden shares this desire, but almost in a reversed way. Rather than maintain truth and individuality himself, Holden focuses upon the ways that others bend their own images and identities. In Holden’s worldview, almost everyone has a shortcoming that can be analyzed and criticized. Throughout his sharp and cutting observations of other people, Holden believes he maintains his own identity and sincerity. All that he does, in his mind, is merely a reaction to the problems he encounters in life.

  Holden, towards the beginning of the novel, very peculiarly admits that “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life” (Salinger 16). This admission is incredibly peculiar due to his focus on phoniness, flashy personae, and so on. However, for Holden, there is a distinction between lying and being fake. One of the more evident examples of Holden criticizing phony behavior is at old Ernie’s bar.  He describes how the piano player, Ernie, “gave this very phony, humble bow. Like as if he was a helluva humble guy. Besides being a terrific piano player. It was very phony” (Salinger 84). In this instance, Holden seems almost entirely focused on character. The fact that Holden (due to influence from D.B) knows old Ernie fairly well enables him to see through the piano player’s façade and understand his deceitful nature.

  Conversely, Holden completely lies to a woman he meets on a train going in to New York from Pencey. The woman’s son is a Pencey student, and she comes to recognize Holden’s Pencey sticker. Rather than be direct with the woman when she asks Holden’s name, he replies with “Rudolf Schmidt.” He explains in interior monologue that he “didn’t feel like giving her my whole life story” (Salinger 55). Yet Holden does not carry himself in an uncharacteristic way during his conversation with the woman. In fact, Holden behaves as only his true self can, at one point even asking the woman if she would like a cocktail. The distinction for Holden seems to come at a crossroads between surface deception and deep, inner deception. Holden throws out fake names like “Jim Steele” and enjoys telling stories, but he does so as himself (if that notion can be followed). People who act phony for appearances, to leave desired impressions and to bend attitudes (like the Pencey principal, or Stratladter, or old Ernie), all try to play a role in society. Holden perceives most of the public in this way, as false at the core and reliant on phony nature. In a sense, he succeeds in finding himself, as he begins to refine his sense of identity and values. And, even in lying, Holden still maintains a fairly fringe existence, living on the boundary of and resisting a true phony life.

Works Cited

Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York : Little Brown and Company, 1991. Print.