"Going Around and Around"

Forced to confront the prospect of the future, Holden and Esther seem to fear the inevitability of living in mundanity and consequently their own fragility within the perpetual cycle. However, both of them seem to regard genuine connection with others as a potential antidote and method of maintaining or grasping individuality within this repeated manufactured "game" of conformity which -- at first glance -- everybody else seems to play. Despite seeing the positivity of connecting with others, perhaps they hold its potential to such an idealistic level -- like Stephen's Mercedes -- that in their small attempts to do so, they either believe themselves to be disappointing, as Esther is more inclined to feel, or claim to be disappointed by others, as Stephen and Holden do. The idea of recognizing someone else in their "pure" form and having your own unadulterated self exposed and fully understood by the world is appealing, but neither Esther, Holden, or Stephen seem to know how to act upon this desire. By the end of Portrait, Stephen concludes that isolation is in fact necessary to realizing your pure form and that the only way to attempt having this unadulterated self fully understood by the world is through a measured distance between the "artist" and "audience." He chooses the potential of some ideal -- and extremely abstract -- form of art and truth and the suggestion that he can ultimately fulfill and discover himself as a supposed constant to combat the constant mundanity of daily life and the sense of repeated lack of fulfillment he feels; (whether or not this sense of "future" and "true" beauty ultimately fulfills him, I don't know). Similarly, Esther desires to seize new opportunities to engage but in actuality only feels "pure" alone in the bath, when the world dissolves.

Holden too, seems to believe in a "pure" self; like his red hunting hat, a unique constant within the mundane constant of life's carousel and low quality tunes. As evident from his misinterpretations of the lyrics as "catch a body" as opposed to "meet a body," Holden seems to desire not only understanding someone in their pure (un-phony?) form but preserving them in this way; perhaps wanting to catch people is what makes it all the more difficult for him to "meet" or understand them in their purity. There's this one part in The Catcher in the Rye, where Holden sees two men with a Christmas tree, one of them saying, "Hold that sonuvabitch up!" And Holden thinks, "It certainly was a gorgeous way to talk about a Christmas tree." I might be letting my imagination go, but it's as if he believes everyone to have a beautiful and pure form, somewhat sacred like a Christmas tree -- yet people fail to recognize its existence and like the "crude" words of the man wrestling with the tree -- in contrast with Holden's daydream of catching others -- the act of keeping each other intact and upright is no longer as simple and potentially fulfilling as he once thought.

With the commitment to this excessively vague concept of a "pure" self, however, it becomes so much easier to feel like you can easily disintegrate. In attempting to constantly distinguish between your unadulterated self and the image you consciously or subconsciously put out without having the pure form understood by others -- or validating its individuality yourself like Stephen attempts to -- you can lose all sense of self. As Holden is walking, he begins to panic, saying, "Allie, don't let me disappear." Watching Lenny and Doreen dancing, Esther thinks, "I felt myself shrinking to a small black dot...I felt like a hole in the ground." In supposedly wanting so much to engage and be fully known, they are reduced to crumbling spectators.

The distaste for the stifling of inevitable routine is further manifested through Esther's disgust at the process of giving birth, the forgetting of pain, willingly going into and experiencing the pain again, and so on, seems to me applicable to patterns of daily life. As such, when Esther stops changing clothes, it shows how her conclusion that pain will always come back -- which no supposedly life changing action like choosing a branch on the fig tree or losing her virginity can erase -- has induced her into living with perpetual pain without "deluding" herself with moments of hope by putting on fresh clothes. As she puts it, "If you don't expect anything, you don't get disappointed." Significantly however, Holden ultimately experiences a sense of euphoria watching Phoebe on the merry-go-round, saying, "All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she'd fall off the goddam horse but I didn't say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall of, they fall off..." In this way, in letting Phoebe reach for the gold ring, Holden has allowed for the dangerous inconstancy of hope -- which may bring pain and lack of fulfillment -- amidst the endless circular movement of the carousel.