Reading Reflection: The White, Adolescent Male Experience in Athol Fugard's Master Harold...and
As we were going through Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold”…and the boys today, I was reminded of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Hally reminded me of Holden Caulfield when he says,
Anybody who thinks there’s nothing wrong with this world needs to have his head examined. Just when things are going along all right, without fail someone or something will come along and spoil everything. Somebody should write that down as a fundamental law of the Universe. The principle of perpetual disappointment. (1476)
Hally’s despondency throughout “Master Harold”…and the boys is very similar to that which Holden expresses throughout The Catcher in the Rye. Specifically, this scene reminded me of the scene in The Catcher in the Rye when Holden visits the museum with his sister and sees the words “Fuck you” gratified in the staircase, on a wall, and various other places he encounters. Holden thinks to himself, “That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write ‘Fuck you’ right under your nose. Try it sometime” (204). In both of these passages, both Hally and Holden see the world as a place of “perpetual disappointment” where the only thing a person can count on, “without fail,” is that those rare instances of happiness, or beauty, or goodness, or peacefulness will be ruined.
After making this initial connect between Hally and Holden, I spent the next couple of hours thinking about more similarities between these two characters and their narratives. Though I do not claim that Fugard is responding to or interacting with Salinger’s work, I find it interesting that both texts attempt to wrestle with similar themes of suffering, authority, and betrayal within the context of male adolescence. To begin, The Catcher in the Rye, like “Master Harold”…and the boys, is a semi-autobiographical work about the author’s experiences as an emotionally injured adolescent male, trying to grapple with his own suffering. Both Fugard and Salinger used writing as a way to make peace with the sins, the heartbreak, and the anger that filled their days as young men and the themes they explore in their stories are similar, in this regard.
Both Holden and Hally have deeply painful relationships with their parents. In Holden’s case, his parents fail to deal with the trauma he sustains after his brother’s death, and he continually feels as though he can never live up to their expectations. Hally’s father is disabled and alcoholic, and his mother has all that she can do to take care of Hally, the business, and Hally’s father. The emotional scars that Hally and Holden carry because of their strained relationships with their parents (and, more specifically, their fathers) propel their action throughout their narratives. Holden wanders aimlessly as he avoids going home so he won’t have to tell his parents about flunking out of school, and Hally lashes out at Sam out of his frustration over his father coming home. Another important similarity between Holden and Hally is that both characters reject the institutional authority of religion and formal education.
Like Holden, Hally identifies himself as an atheist. Though both characters do not identify with Christianity, it seems that Holden interacts with the person of Jesus in a far more meaningful and mature way than Hally does. As we talked about in class today, Hally rejects Jesus from Sam’s list of “Men of Magnitude” seemingly out of spite toward Sam because of Sam’s faith. As you pointed out, Hally’s hero Tolstoy’s ethical framework was modeled on Jesus’ beliefs about social justice. This highlights how limited Hally’s perspective toward religion, and more specifically toward Jesus. Even though Holden also identifies himself as an atheist, his understanding of Jesus displays a level of wisdom that Hally has yet to develop. In one of my favorite scenes in The Catcher in the Rye, Holden thinks to himself, “…I'd bet a thousand bucks that Jesus never sent old Judas to Hell. I still would, too, if I had a thousand bucks. I think any one of the Disciples would've sent him to Hell and all—and fast, too—but I'll bet anything Jesus didn't do it” (100). In this passage, Holden, a person who completely rejects the church, is able to recognize that there is something special about Jesus. In a world where people desecrate the beautiful and the sacred with ugliness and the profane, Jesus is a person who extends unfathomable forgiveness and mercy, even to Judas, someone Jesus dearly loved yet still betrayed him. It seems that despite Hally's familiarity with an array of philosophical and literary works, Holden displays a level of emotional depth and insight that Hally does not or, possibly, cannot. And this, I think is what makes the ending of “Master Harold”…and the boys so profound: Sam, like Jesus, extends grace to someone who has betrayed him, someone who “don’t know at all what [he’s] just done” (1483). Sam does not condemn Hally. Instead, Sam continues to be generous in his compassion and understanding.
Works Cited
Fugard, Athol. "’Master Harold’…and the boys." The Bedford Introduction to Drama. Ed. Lee A. Jacobus. Fourth ed. N.p.: Bedford St. Martins, n.d.1466-84. Print.
Salinger, J D. The Catcher in the Rye. First ed. N.p.: Back Bay Books, 1945. 1-288. Print.