I just finished reading "The catcher in the rye", it's good, but I don't get what made Mark Chapman go crazy and kill Lennon. He was a big phony yeah, I get that, I just can't understand how can a book trigger a murder desire. If someone please could explain this to me, would really appreciate :)
shareMental illness played a big role. The book builds hatred towards phony people, and a mentally-ill person might take action. A normal person would not have reacted to the book the way Mark David Chapman did.
I don't have a signature.
do you feel the erg to kill someone? i think i didn't kill anyone yet because i never finished it, it's so boring. and chapman is cia agent.
share[deleted]
Chapman had either paranoid schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, wasn't being treated for it, and exacerbated the issue with heavy cocaine use. To say his thinking and rationality were impaired and disordered would be a bit of an understatement.
Now, I think his reasoning as muddled as it was was that he needed to be the Catcher in the Rye (like Holden Caufield), stopping the innocent children from accidentally running off the cliff (i.e. losing their innocence). A big part of Chapman's own innocence in his mind was shattered when the person he idolized in his youth didn't manage to live up to his expectations. So he had the resentment, but he also I think believed that John Lennon was an innocent, or at least was viewed as one, very much hero-worshipped by most of the general public despite his shortcoming vis-a-vis his personal relationships, his drug use, his alleged hypocrisy.
So by killing Lennon, Chapman was seeking to metaphorically trap him in amber, wanting his image to keep it's innocence for an eternity, and to possibly keep his experience of being shattered when he realized Lennon was just a regular person with all the foibles we all have from happening to others. In a twisted and sick way, he seems to have succeeded to an extent as John Lennon is held up as a paragon despite not exactly based on the way he lived his live in reality.
I'm not endorsing Chapman's logic by any stretch of the imagination, this is just what I think was running through his delusion mind as a motive.
At least somebody got it.. I in no way endorse Chapman but in a way he did crystalize Lennon's image. This was just the beginning of the 80s and still somewhat early into his solo career, who's to know what would have become of Lennon's legacy and reputation. I love of stars/demi-Gods fell in the 80s, with the rise of a much more "in your face" style of music and media. Some say the lack of Lennon, was the downfall of the youth but we may never know.
Chapman DID, however fatally frame Lennon as the epitome of peace & solidarity and "saved" him from a particularly cold and phony world that we may have very well fallen victim too. Lennon never had a chance to fall from grace.... and that may have been a blessing.
"Oh... I'm not afraid."
-Pamela Voorhees
Ironically sociopath Charles Manson perverted the meaning behind The Beatles "White Album" with songs such as "Helter Skelter" being interpreted by him as representing a black v white race war. He then used all that as justification for killing Sharon Tate and others.
share