The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger - Essay Example

The Catcher in the Rye The Catcher in the Rye presents 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 this novel 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. The author of The Catcher in the Rye offers an interesting example of the mystery that appears when considering the source of creativity within a person, as he seems to exhibit all the malaise that his most famous character does (Alexander, 2000). Salinger himself rarely appears in public and has not written a full length novel since this, his first one. Some of the details of his life that are known are the fact that he has been married to two teenaged women, and that he constantly seems to be interested in the very young as subject matter. Salinger seems to spend much of his life trying to keep his private life just that, private. Some have suggested that this is merely a ploy upon his part to keep publicity and interest in his books. As Alexander (2000) suggests, "a manipulative way of promoting himself and his books". The fact that Salinger himself seems to have lived a rather troubled, antisocial and often apparently bitter life suggests that Holden Caulfield is more of a reflection of something within his psyche than the author cares to admit. The need to constantly have relationships with much younger women seems to suggest that Salinger, like Caulfield, has the need to try and control the world at all costs (Kotzen, 2001). He seeks to control public knowledge of his work but somehow comes off to the public as something of a "phony". This is highly ironic considering this is the ultimate insult in the view of his famous character. Perhaps like Caulfield, Salinger had the chance of changing, of transforming and of finding a new identity, but somehow failed in the actual execution of it. Salinger remains with Caulfield, the two figures indelibly linked, frozen in time in 1951, even though Salinger himself is far removed from his teenage rebellious years and is facing the end of this life in his eighties. Holden Caulfield is somehow alienated from a world that he actually defines, much as Salinger has sought to isolate himself from a literary world that his eccentricity and mystery is an embodiment. Perhaps this is his deliberate legacy. ______________________________________ Works Cited Alexander, Paul. Salinger. Renaissance Books, New York: 2000. Hamilton, Ian. In Search of JD Salinger. Random House, New York: 1990. Kptzen, Kip. With Love and Squalor: 14 Writers Respond to the Work of JD Salinger. Broadway, New York: 2001 Salinger, JD. The Catcher in the Rye. Littlebrown, New York: 1951. Salinger, JD. For Esme - With Love and Squalor, and Other Stories. Penguin, New York: 2004. Read More