Holden Caulfield's 'Catch' On American Society

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Holden Caulfield’s “Catch” on American Society

In the novel, The Catcher In the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, the ‘ideal’ American of the 1950’s is someone who follows the rules and expectations, has a comfortable, yet well-supported “white picket fence” family, and believes the “American Dream” to be the standard of all American politics. Besides the fact that I think I may have heard Holden Caulfield snicker at the last sentence, he would have most likely agreed. The values that he disparages in the book have significance in American society in the 1950’s and perhaps still pertain today in a modernized, altered version.
An ideal American aims to do good in school, go to college, and attain a successful …show more content…

In The Catcher In the Rye, Holden describes his family as being far from that. On the outside, they look like a happy family. The father is a lawyer, the mother shops for nice clothes for the family in New York City, and their teenage sons is away at a prestigious private boarding school, while the other one is in Hollywood with a successful career of writing scripts for movies. On the other hand, Holden is very clear about how he feels about his brother, and the movies, “Now he’s out in Hollywood, D.B, being a prostitute. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me (Salinger, 2).” Holden believes that the movies are a “phony” representation of real life, they involve people acting like everything is okay when it isn’t. The fact that his own brother is “selling out” his stories to these frauds is pretty ironic. The movies are scripted, and everything is always happy in the end, but it doesn’t work out like that in real life; people die, parents split up, and families become estranged. A prime example of a perfect 1950’s screen family is portrayed in the television show, “Leave it to Beaver.” A television show in which a family lives comfortably within the constraints of their white picket fence, seemingly ignoring the post-war drama going on outside (“1950’s Social

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