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January Man and January Man

One of the things that stood out to me immediately was that the first and the last chapter were both called January Man. While this book was basically talking about Jason developing over the span of an entire year, those chapters were probably the most meaningful ones.  In the first Chapter Jason talked about a lot of different events happening and while a lot of them unfolded more with the months passing by, he didn’t discover his Dad’s deepest secret until 12 months later.  Jason's character had an amazing development over the span of 365 days and while that is a normal age to go through changes, his personality developed impressively. In the first chapter Jason had this interaction at night with this elderly woman because he sprained his ankle on the lake, while he was skating. Somehow over the next 11 Chapters we didn’t get more information about the strange happenings during that night, but in the last Chapter Jason found the courage to go back into the forest and face th...
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Bruce as a father...

W as Bruce the perfect father? No, definitely not, but there were those moments throughout the book where Alison and him had this good connection. At various points during the book it seemed like Alison and Bruce had a normal father-daughter-relationship, but is that enough to call it a good relationship? Or did Bruce even put in all of his effort to make their relationship the best it can be? I think the first pages of the book were making me hopeful that it is a story of a daughter and her father with a happy ending. How Alison described them playing together. Bruce appeared like a good father to me and I could not have known how big his secret is. After Alison talked about her experience growing up with a Dad who always wants her to dress in pink dresses and wants her to live in a pink room, I just thought he didn’t want his daughter to turn out in a way that is not stereotypical for this time and I would have not expected that he was trying to live through her.  A secret as big...
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Mental Health and Society around the 60s and 70s…

In 1955, 560.000 people were treated in Hospitals in the US for severe mental illness, 67 years later in 2022 11.4 Million adults in the United States alone struggled with serious suicidal thoughts. But how can this number increase by so much? Surely things like social media play a role in this, but one of the main things is society. In the 1960s and 1970s mental health issues were not talked about and people did not believe in psychiatrists and mental health issues. Thankfully now, society is more open-minded and people are more aware of mental health issues and experience more and better treatment.   Sylvia Plath was one of those people who got treated for her mental health issues in the 1960s and 1970s and in her book “The Bell Jar" she talks about her experience of struggling with mental health issues in those years.  While she was still in New York for her summer program we started seeing the first signs of her mental illness, but it wasn’t until she came back home a...
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How Holdens childhood relates to his actions throughout the book...

Holden is the perfect example of a Jerk.  At the beginning of the book, I did not think that I could like him. He is one of those people that are rude to everybody around them and that are not putting any effort into understanding other people. Throughout the book, Holden talked to us like we could relate to him but in all honesty, I was never able to relate to him. I was annoyed by his complaining, his not taking anything seriously, and his lies. He was behaving like he was mature, telling us as the reader how much he can drink and how wise he is even though he is only 16. For me, he always was an immature boy who was just rebelling. His flunking out of Pencey and then running away and drinking underage always just seemed like teenage behavior. Of course, it is not the classical behavior of most of us teenagers but there are a lot of teenagers out there thinking they know everything and Holden is one of them.  His character development was interesting to me because, until the...
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