The boorish prep school roommate, the hypocritical teacher, the stupid women in the Lavender Room, the resentful prostitute, the conventional girl friend, the bewildered cab driver, the affected young man at the theater, the old friend who reveals that his interest in Holden is homosexual—these people are all truly objectionable and deserve the places Holden assigns them in his secret hierarchy of class with its categories of phonies, bores, deceivers, and perverts.
But they are nonetheless human, albeit dehumanized, and constitute a fair average of what the culture affords. They are part of the truth which Holden does not see and, as it turns out, is never able to see—that this is what one part of humanity is: the lies, the phoniness, the hypocrisy are the compromises which innocence is forced by the world to make. He remains at the end what he was at the beginning—cynical, defiant, and blind.
And as for ourselves, there is identification but no insight, a sense of pathos but not of tragedy. It may be that Mr. It was easy enough to identify with his adolescent angst, but his puerile attitudinizing was something else altogether.
That was then. This is half a century later. The novel is commonly represented as an expression of adolescent cynicism and rebellion—a James Dean movie in print—but from first page to last Salinger wants to have it both ways.
Indeed a case can be made that The Catcher in the Rye created adolescence as we now know it, a condition that barely existed until Salinger defined it. He established whining rebellion as essential to adolescence and it has remained such ever since. Morris Longstreth, reviewing the novel in the Christian Science Monitor , Twice there is a reminder of Shakespeare. It could be debated long just how irrational is Holden Caulfield, as likewise, Hamlet.
Holden, who is the clown, villain, and even moderately, the hero of this tale, is asked not to return to his school after Christmas. This is his third expulsion and he cannot endure to face his parents, so he hides out in New York, where his conduct is a nightmarish medley of loneliness, bravado, and supineness. He is as unbalanced as, a rooster on a tightrope. He asks a girl to elope with him and then calls her names. He suffers from loneliness because he has shut himself away from the normal activities of boyhood, games, the outdoors, friendship.
But he is also capable of wholesome revulsion from contact with the human dregs, and impulsively seeks a kind of absolution by offering help to others. He hates what is wrong with the movies, and in the end he forgets himself and his hoped-for escape into freedom to help his sister. He is alive, human, preposterous, profane and pathetic beyond belief. Fortunately, there cannot be many of him yet.
But one fears that a book like this given wide circulation may multiply his kind—as too easily happens when immortality and perversion are recounted by writers of talent whose work is countenanced in the name of art or good intention. Verdict: Keep him away from the kids, lest he infect them with his pathetic perversion. And it may be Phoebe who provokes his longing for stasis because he fears that she may be changed—perhaps at his own hand. Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature.
By Emily Temple. Alfred Kazin Holden Caulfield J. You can buy it here. After looking at some animals, they walk to the park, now on the same side of the street, although still not quite together.
They come to the carousel, and Holden convinces Phoebe to ride it. He sits on a park bench, watching her go around and around. They have reconciled, he is wearing his red hunting hat, and suddenly he feels so happy he thinks he might cry. Holden concludes his story by refusing to discuss what happened after his day in the park with Phoebe, although he does say that he went home, got sick, and was sent to the rest home from which he now tells his story.
Talking about what happened to him makes him miss all the people in his story. As the chapter begins, Holden feels surrounded on all sides by ugliness and phoniness—the profanity on the walls, the vulgar Christmas-tree delivery men, the empty pomp of Christmas—and his recent interactions with Phoebe and Mr.
Antolini have left him feeling completely lonely and alienated. As he wanders the streets of New York, he looks at children and prays to Allie to keep him from disappearing as the ducks disappeared and as Allie himself disappeared. Antolini was, at least in part, correct: Holden does not feel connected to his environment.
He imagines that he is an ephemeral presence that will instantaneously vanish. As a result, he makes the only decision that seems logical in such a situation: he decides to run away.
Unable to deal with the world around him, and realizing that his cynical view of the world is not grounded in reality, he decides to leave. Phoebe demands to go with Holden, but it is unclear whether she needs him or whether she worries that he needs her. Nevertheless, Holden sees the effect his plans have on someone he cares about—his first sign of true maturity. He begins to come out of his shell, demonstrating concern for Phoebe and a willingness to love people around him.
After Holden makes the decision to stay and Phoebe forgives him, she returns his hunting hat, reciprocating his gesture of kindness. In Chapter 24 Holden wakes up to Mr. Antolini touching his head, and he thinks his former teacher is trying to molest him. Although the reader has no definite way to tell whether Holden reads the situation correctly, it seems likely that Mr.
Antolini is not making a pass at him. For one thing, Holden has consistently proven himself an unreliable judge of character. He frequently makes snap judgments that lack sufficient grounding in reality, particularly regarding issues related to sexuality.
Holden has deep-seated anxiety about his sexuality, and he frequently deflects that anxiety by projecting homosexual desires onto other male characters. This may explain why Holden has such a sudden shift in his perception of Mr. Nevertheless, it remains possible that Mr. But regardless of the truth about Mr. Seeing no reason to stay on campus and wallow in humiliation, he simply leaves. He therefore runs away from Pencey because it represents a place of profound loneliness.
When Sunny eventually arrives and undresses, Holden shuts down. I felt much more depressed than sexy. In Chapter 9, Holden looks out of his hotel window into other rooms, where he sees a "distinguished-looking" man prancing about in women's clothes, and a couple squirting water or highballs or something into each other's mouths.
We have no idea about 1, but we think the answer for 2 is … yes. If you really like a girl, he says, you wouldn't want to "do crumby stuff" to her 9. This means Holden has to either fulfill his sexual urges with girls he doesn't care about, or not fulfill them at all. Holden's second problem, he says, is that when he's fooling around with a girl and she suggests they stop, he actually … stops. But, somehow, Holden can't find a balance between respecting a woman and her saying "no" and taking sexual control of a situation where—maybe—the woman wants him to.
Maybe Holden has good reason to respect boundaries. After all, he does maybe experience a come-on at the hands of his former teacher, and he did maybe have "perverty" stuff happen to him "about twenty times since [he] was a kid" And Jane either did or did not get molested by her stepfather. Why all this ambiguity? What we have is Holden, a confused, possibly sex-crazed sixteen year old who admits that he "just [doesn't] understand" sex 9.
One last thought: could Holden be gay? Is that why he feels confused and alienated? Well, maybe. And he's not comfortable with the thought of having sex with a woman. Holden may not understand himself too well, and he may be troubled, but he does come up with some Yoda-like statements that really knock our socks off. Now, this isn't exactly Algebra or Ancient Egyptian History, but there's a real emotional intelligence here.
Holden understands people: how they think, how they act, and why they do what they do. In fact, you could even argue that Salinger made Holden too emotionally mature—that a real sixteen-year-old would never have this level of wisdom, even if he thought he did. So what? Babies born with cauls are sometimes said to have supernatural powers, and the caul itself has been traditionally considered good luck.
And also useful protection against drowning, go figure. Maybe Salinger just liked the sound of the word? And guess who name-checks David Copperfield as the very beginning of his own story? We talk about the irony a in "What's Up With the Title?
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