I don't know how many of you know the book The Catcher in the Rye, but we read it last year in the best class I've ever taken called The Coming of Age novel. Thinking about Nicolas Scoby and how I was sobbing over his suicide, I realized some interesting parallels that Scoby has to the main character in TCITR, Holden Caulfield. For those of you who don't know, I'll do a little summarizing and biography-ing below for your edification.
So, TCITR is a short-but-long one/two day journey of a teenage boy named Holden Caulfield. It's the end of the winter semester, and Holden is slated to be expelled from his prestigious all-boys boarding school after being expelled from a long list of other schools. He decides to dip before the semester is officially over and goes wandering around Central Park (in New York) to wait things out. By the end of the novel, the day has passed and the Holden from two years later looks back on this little adventure as a time when he (maybe) grew up a little.
Holden has a very distinct characteristic in that, like Scoby, on the outside, he is very cool and has a facade of being very adult and somewhat mature, but on the inside, he likes childhood and the innocence and purity that comes with it and wants to cherish it. He's uncomfortable with sexual relations with women though he talks about it with his school buddies, he's nice to strangers, and he wants to go back to a time when things were simpler, like in his childhood.
This, I think, is the essence of Scoby's spiral into depression. Basketball, the real essence of basketball, is the childhood memory of it; the purity of just playing the game for the fun of it, no money or pride on the line, just pure simple fun. This was only possible for him during his childhood - everything past that forces some amount of expectation on him. Later, when we see his breakdown and "homesickness", we see that he's trying to bring elements of Hillside to Boston, but more than that he's trying to bring quintessential elements of his childhood back to Boston. Most importantly, these attempts are futile - the smog from the cars he brings back eventually disapates, which I think is a metaphor for how the time of his childhood is gone - time only moves forward, and Scoby can't handle that to a certain extent. His inability to go back to a simpler time when basketball and a god wasn't all he was depresses him and is what ultimately drives him to commit suicide.
