I think we can all agree that Holden Caulfield's narration of his week around Christmas is one of the most famous weeks for a teenager in literary history. His voice is also very distinctive. This weekend I've been working on the extra assignment trying to write a reflective response to Portrait in Holden's voice. At first I was leaning towards doing just a standard plain voice and throw in lots of "and all" "goddam" and "that depressed me." Until I started writing I hadn't looked to much into the voice-sure I knew it sounded different, a little older and slightly more elevated voice than Gunnar Kaufman's, but that what made it different was the words he loved to use. I wrote two sentences, two sentences, before I realized that it's the whole way Holden looks at things, like how he doesn't mind digression, or he repeats an idea when he gets really excited by the idea that makes his voice so distinctive.
Then as I started writing and I was forced to make another decision. As Mr. Mitchell said in class we had to decide which style of speech we wanted Holden to be speaking in. I didn't want him to speak in such a conversational tone as in Catcher, it's supposed to be a school essay and all. I read over the scene with Mr. Antolini, and in it they are witty and speak to each other more in a peer way than a student to teacher dynamic. I decided to go with a semi-conversational tone for Holden because while he wouldn't be one to follow every guideline as to appropriate essay writing, he also is doing it for a grade for a teacher he cares about. Once I started writing in his voice, it became easier to write in his voice, I almost didn't have to think about writing in a different voice than my own because it was a very natural voice. It really just flowed, and once it did, it was really enjoyable to write in his voice.
I really enjoyed your reflection on writing in Holden's voice. This was an assignment that I chose not to try to tackle, yet I was very interested in how other people wrote. Might I just add that even in this post you were very Holden-esque. "it's supposed to be a school essay and all." That is literally something I could imagine Holden to say!!! I think you must have been stuck in "Holden mode" when you wrote this.
ReplyDeleteGreat reflection, and thanks for the insight! Now you make me wish I would have attempted it...maybe I'll try it someday just for fun.
I can totally relate to this writing process. I also found it challenging to imitate the rhythm of the paragraphs. I would never put a short, nondescript sentence between paragraphs in an essay, but Holden seems to do it quite a bit. As Wyatt pointed out about your writing style, I also started subconsciously speaking in Holden's voice after writing this paper! It earned me strange looks from my parents, but I had a lot of fun writing the paper!
ReplyDeleteYeah, I found this to be a particularly interesting assignment because, although I have practiced pastiching authorial voices before, it feels different to take on the voice of a fictional character. It's much more like acting than analyzing sentence structure and digressive styles of authors and trying to reproduce that. Although goal of the assignment being to analyze Stephen through Holden's point of view, I dove FAR deeper into Holden's character than Stephen's. I ended up spending the analysis on two lines of Stephen's journal that were the only lines that Holden approved of. It was extremely interesting however, I found that the narrative voice of the novel was not well suited to writing a short, tight scholarly essay.
ReplyDeleteThose of you who have completed the assignment are welcome to post the results to your blogs--with maybe a short intro, by way of identification and information.
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