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Compare Catcher In The Rye And Arcadia

Decent Essays

It is said that your experiences during childhood shape whether you belief there is hope for the human race. Both Salinger and Stoppard having faced difficulties in life what with Stoppard’s family having to flee from the Nazi’s when he was only 2 and his father dying a prisoner of war when he was only 4 whilst Salinger had difficulties fitting in in schools,taking measures to conform, such as calling himself Jerry, and having dropped out of multiple schools after being called a ‘mediocre’ student just like his protagonist Holden. These experiences shaped these authors outlook on life and how they wrote. Both Arcadia and The Catcher In The Rye seem to investigate how ‘hellish’ of a place the world really is. They don’t give the world a chance to defend itself, a chance to show the good possibilities it can offer. Instead they focus on death,decay and chaos. The lack of hope in humanity can explain the insanity and the mental breakdown portrayed by the characters. Stoppard in his play engages with the chaos theory.A central tenet of the chaos theory is that predicting the behaviour of a physical object is complicated by the fact that even small events can have very large effects. Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output. A phenomenon given the name ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’. Arcadia’s more intelligent characters seem to understand this concept as Septimus’s declamation of disorder into disorder and the

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