The Character's Search for Identity in Novels - Book Report/Review Example

Compare the ways in which each presents the protagonist's search for identity in The Catcher in the Rye and The Color Purple Both The Catcherin the Rye and The Color Purple present memorable characters who are, in one way or another, alienated from the worlds within which they live. Alienation and dissatisfaction are perhaps the hall-marks of the modern teenager, but in these two novels they are taken to an extreme level. Indeed, one of the characters, Holden Caulfield, has become perhaps the most infamous character in all of literature. Many real people, often of a disturbed nature, have found a home within Holden's search for an identity.1 Holden Caulfield does not appear to be a very sympathetic character on first glance. He is resoundingly negative in his view of the world, and his search for an identity is constantly filtered through his dark condemnation of virtually everything and everyone around him. The facts of his life show that he is unable to stick at anything for very wrong: he drops out of several schools, is hospitalized in a mental hospital, and seems unable to connect with anyone in a meaningful manner. This anomie is associated with two traumatic experiences: the death of his brother and the suicide of boy in one of classes. Holden searches for an identity through criticizing everyone around him. His word for them, one that has entered the language as a pejorative instantly associated with the character, is that they are all "phony". Virtually everybody that Holden sees around him is phony, and it is a judgment that eventually makes him turn towards himself. He judges people in a superficial way, and uses humor to cover the fact that he realizes how utterly alone he is in the world. The passage in which he imagines that someone will probably write "fuck you"2 on his grave his hilarious and yet deeply revealing. The fact that he would think about his own grave as a teenager, let alone the abuse that someone would write on his headstone, shows that Holden has a more imaginative and deeper view of the world than his resolute condemnations of everyone suggest. His cursing and his cynicism are perhaps a protection as, like many teenagers, he has no idea of what his real identity is or should be. This tendency is seen in the first lines of the book: If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me . . . 3 He adopts the pose of millions of teenagers who came after him: not caring about the world and all its conventionalities of biography, but accidentally reveals that he is surprisingly well-read. He has just been expelled from prep-school, and reveals that he has not only read Charles Dickens, but has understood it well enough to make fun of its conventions. Holden's search for identity throughout the novel is full of such accidental revelations of a deeper self. As with many teenage boys, Holden is obsessed with sex; but unlike many of them he is peculiarly puritanical about the subject. He admits that he is a virgin, and spends most of the novel trying to lose that virginity but also thinks that sex should only occur between people who care deeply about one another. Casual sex is an abomination to him, as when Jane has a date with a boy she hardly knows. At the same time, Holden reveals that he is interested in a much darker side of sexuality, such as the idea of spitting at a lover during the sexual act. Once again this reveals the depth of his imagination: he is a virgin but can imagine a particularly savage form of sexuality that involves humiliating and essentially hating the partner. He regards this behavior as "crumby", but want to indulge anyway. Holden's search for an identity is constantly hindered by his reluctance to move from his supposedly innocent childhood world of genuineness and openness into the hypocritical adult world of phonies. Here his name has important symbolic meaning. Caulfield seems to be taken from the caul, which is a membrane that covers (and protects) a baby's head while it is being born. It protects, but also essentially blinds the baby to the light of the real world. Doctors and psychologists have speculated that this may be a way of delaying the full shock of the light of the outside world after the baby has been cocooned in relative darkness. So his surname may symbolize the fact that Holden Caulfield wants to quite literally "hold on to" the protection of the "caul" that is now long gone. He is of course a teenager on the brink of manhood, but the resonance of that early protection still remains. A hesitancy towards physical contact may also be part of this facet of Holden's personality. His obsession with sex is problematized by his reluctance to touch or be touched by anyone else. When his teacher touches his forehead he assumes that it is some kind of a homosexual pass, he is deeply nervous when Sunny sits on his lap, and even has some problem when his little sister hugs him. Holden's search for an identity is constantly hindered by the discrepancy between his desires and what he can actually deal with. But by the end of the novel there is finally some sense that his character may actually be developing to a more mature sense of the world. Ironically this occurs after the hilarious episode with Mr Antolini, who perhaps gets a little too close to Holden (making him wonder whether he can suddenly turn homosexual), but, more importantly, encourages the Holden to actually explore his feelings and experiences of the world through writing. He is the first adult who portrays education as a way of revealing individual identity and self-fulfillment rather than a disciplined conformity. It is he, and the fact that Holden realizes that he may have judged him both too harshly and too quickly, that makes the teenage boy realize that perhaps he has been wrong about many people. The search for an identity involves many failures and false moves, especially for a teenager as disturbed as Holden Caulfield, but this brief incident of self-awareness shows that he is both capable of change and, perhaps more importantly, capable of realizing that he must change if he is to break through his current malaise. In The Color Purple the protagonist, Celie, is alienated from the world, but for very different reasons than those slim ones given by Holden in the previous book. Celie comes from a poor black family and the reader learns in the first of her letters (the novel is epistolary in form) that she has been raped by her step-father. The man concerned, Alphonso, has told Celie that she should not tell anyone what has happened because "it'd kill your mammy".4 She believes him and decides to deal with the situation by writing letters "to God", who she envisions as an imposing white man with a beard. Her reaction to her rape and Alphonso's threats show that she is innocent as to the reality of the world: she is afraid to tall anyone because of what Alphonso has said will happen to her mother. As Colden was caught between childhood and an adult world that he neither fully understood nor trusted, so Celie has to travel through one of the most difficult times of her life with a rapist's baby, that soon turns into two when he molests her again. Celie writes to God at this early stage in the book, hoping that he will save her. Her identity is essentially that of a little girl looking to be reassured. The difference between Celie and Holden is that Celie actually develops well beyond this early point of impotence, in which she says "I don't know how to fight", Essentially she moves from ignorance and fear to knowledge and self-respect: she travels much further in her search for identity than Holden does. Of course this is partly due to the fact that Holden only has a few days to change within the novel, whereas Waler's novel tells Celie's story form the age of fourteen to her early fifties at the end. She is a young, abused and inexperienced girl at the beginning, a mature woman at the end who understands the world. More than half the letters are written from Celie to God, and so her relationship with the deity is essential to an understanding of her development of identity. She starts by writing to God as a blue-eyed white male, something akin perhaps to Robert Powell's portrayal of Jesus in several Hollywood movies. Because God does not answer her prayers Celie assumes that he "must be asleep"5. The personalized vision of God that fails to answer her prayers, one that seems to stem from a the naturally egocentric view of the world so often displayed by a teenager, moves slowly into a different vision as the novel progresses. God develops into something that is neither male nor female; it is a God that is present in all things. While she remains at least nominally Christian, Celie is influenced by those around her into seeing a broader vision of the world. Nettie says, "we know a rootleaf is not Jesus Christ, but in its own humble way, is it not God" Celie ends up answering this question with a resounding "yes". In one of the later letters she starts with the following greeting: "Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear everything. Dear God." As her vision and definition of God develops into something far more inclusive and universal, so Celie becomes more happy and self-aware as the novel progresses. Her identity essentially expands form the frightened, terribly abused girl to a confident woman who can stride through the whole world and recognize God everywhere. Perhaps most importantly, she realizes that God may not answer all of a person's prayers, because it is up to the person to fulfill their own wishes and win their own struggles. Part of this inclusiveness exists within the women who both support and nurture Celie as she grows up, a favor that she can return as she becomes a wiser adult. Celie becomes an integral and vibrant part of the world around her, a stark contrast to Holden, who remains insular and alienated from the world in all but small ways at the end of Catcher in the Rye. Holden despises everyone, and perceptively recognizes the foibles, eccentricities and weakness of all around him. Celie recognizes these same traits, but realizes that forgiveness and generosity are what is needed in the world. She has truly suffered (far more than the kind of self-inflicted angst that Holden reveals), but through this true suffering comes redemption. Alice Walker was essentially an optimist, and while little is known of JD Salinger, it would appear from his single novel that the word could not be applied to him. Waler is an optimist because, while she believes that there is evil and wrongdoing in the world, there is also the chance for that evil to develop and change. From change comes hope, and it is hope in all its forms that is the central message of The Color Purple. Celie ultimately gains knowledge and self-awareness, essentially creates an identity of herself throughout the novel. Some of the most controversial scenes, involving explicit descriptions of lesbian sex, are far from gratuitous. They exist within the book to contrast with the deep suspicion and hatred of sex that her awful teenage experiences engendered within Celie. Unlike Holden (who to be fair only has a few days) she ends up moving beyond the terrors of her early sexual experiences into a fully-fledged sexual identity. Interestingly, Celie is uneducated, and writes in the language of the uneducated. Holden, almost depite himself, is educated, and reveals his education in numerous ways throughout the book. But while Holden can write more eloquently, and has a host of allusions at his fingertips (from the Dickens reference in the first paragraph on) he is somehow less convincing in his portrayal of the world than Celie, whose view is necessarily limited to actual experience rather than the wider wisdom of books. Perhaps this shows that it is genuine feeling and an openness to the world that creates a real identity, not the detached cynicism of the over-educated but emotionally lacking. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Works Cited JD Salinger, Catcher in the Rye,Little-Brown, New York: 1951. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple, Pocket Books, New York: 1990. Read More