Holden Caulfield Conformity

The 1940’s marked a turning point for the young adult. With the newly coined term “teen-ager”, this generation faced massively intense decisions, as they were being shipped off to fight in World War II by the dozen. As a result, teenagers from the 1940’s to the 1950’s were expected to have grown up and found their way far before many of them actually had. Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in J.D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, is a pure embodiment of the how the repercussions of these expectations of teenagers (especially boys) to rapidly conform and mature, left many young men confused and searching for their own identity in a world of increasingly right wing authorities. Holden being the clearly deeply tormented character that he is, it is

(Murphy, 2) Holden, born in 1933, was at the peak of his teenage years and his time at Pencey during this tumultuous time. The commotion surrounding the war drove a wedge between adults values and children’s young minds, as they struggled to understand the war itself and the uneasiness it caused. Much of America began to lean towards conservatism, and culturally, social rules served as a “code of conformity” for the younger generation. So, as the cultural and social divide between teenagers and adults grew, a new youth culture sprung about, one that attempted to find their way around this new found cultural and parental censorship. The strive to surpass their parental restriction gave birth to a newfangled breed of delinquents. It has been said that the first independent mass youth culture in the twentieth century came about among this crowd of rebels, who created new rituals and customs that have since left their mark on this period in American history. While these new ideals often were (and still are) seen as a more radical departure from the parent culture than they really were, the teenagers of this period did set the example for other developments. (Austin,

Almost everyone Holden encounters, such as his teachers, classmates, friends, and members of his New York community, is a “phony,” behaving in accordance with artificial conventions that he is trying to rebel against. (Aubry) This new wave of teenage rebellion conceived a brand new youth culture that is different than anything before, and Holden is caught up in the middle of it. “The Catcher in the Rye has served as a resonant expression of alienation for several generations of adolescent readers and adults who have considered themselves at odds with the norms and institutions of American society.” (Aubry) Holden finds himself at odds with these norms as struggles to conform to the expectations of conservative parents and a strict conformist society, and that is where his feelings of rebellion stem