There is certainly no doubt Holden is struggling with severe depression all throughout the novel, making his many internal conflicts just that much challenging and arduous. Holden’s early life is traumatizing and complex, to say the least. In elaboration, "Holden Caulfield has to wrestle not only with the usual difficult adjustments of the adolescent years, in sexual, familial, and peer relationships; he also has to bury Allie before he can make the transition into adulthood" (Bloom 87 Holden). These hardships take an extremely strenuous toll on Holden and cause him to become an outcast as he participates in destructive behavior and has trouble controlling his sadness and anger. For example, Holden tells the reader, “I was crying and all. …show more content…
To elaborate, instead of coming out of his stressful teenage years more mature and grown up, he still possesses his same childish views on life. Additionally, this desire to be the “catcher in the rye” proves that Holden is far from cold and cynical, but that he is just an extremely confused and lost teenage boy. Perhaps the best example of Holden’s desire to protect child innocence shines through with his younger sister, Phoebe. "With Phoebe, Holden is at home in a world of innocence and integrity" (Engel 44). Some readers argue that it is almost as if Phoebe is a younger version of himself, which explains why he desires to protect her so badly. Likewise, Holden exhibits this same behavior when visiting the museum. As he explains, “The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be you" (Salinger 121). This clearly illustrates his reluctance to change and mature. As Barlow relates Holden’s younger sister and the museum he explains, "Phoebe is one of those things Holden would like to stick in one of those glass cases to keep her from changing. She is this terrific, smart, kid, and Holden doesn't want her to change" (1). Eventually, Holden does evolve, and ultimately, his acceptance of Phoebe's need to grow and mature indicates that he is taking a step forward from believing he needs to be her protector and thus, his own maturation begins. He seems to truly surrender to the inevitability of growing up, and ultimately, "Holden would like to be able to keep little kids pure, and to prevent people from getting hurt or corrupted — but he can't, and he knows it, and this is what leads to his breakdown” (Barlow
The ducks in Central Park are first mentioned in the novel during Holden’s conversation with Old Spencer and they are used to teach the reader about Holden’s feelings regarding flunking out of Pencey and give the reader a status report on Holden. Throughout the conversation, Holden stays relatively on topic and the few tangents he goes on are very short and related to what he talks about. The only time in the whole conversation when Holden really blanks out is when he “[thinks] about the lagoon in Central Park” (16). Holden wonders if the lagoon will be frozen over when he arrives home and where did the ducks go if it was frozen. When Holden’s focus returns to his conversation with Old Spencer, the conversation turns in a different direction.
in all but one of his subjects. He does not like to talk about his
We see during the novel that Holden wants to be able to protect innocence in the world, however by the end of the story he lets go of that desire. This is a point of growth for Holden. He finds that it is impossible and unnecessary to keep all the innocence in the world. While with Phoebe Holden says, “I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye...I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff...That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye” (173). In this moment Holden wants to be able to preserve all the youth and innocence in the world. He doesn’t accept that kids have to grow and change and that they can’t stay innocent forever. Later on in the story when Holden is with Phoebe at a carousel again he thinks, “The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the golden ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it’s bad if you say anything to them.” At the end of the novel Holden realizes and comes to terms with the fact that kids grow and lose their innocence. He moves from his want to be the “catcher in the rye” to...
Holden soon finds himself searching for a record to buy his sister Phoebe. He sees this family walking out of church—a mother, father, and a little kid about six years old. Holden hears the child singing the song, “If a body catch a body coming through the rye” and it lifted his spirits. “It made me feel better. It made me feel not so depressed anymore” (Salinger 150). Holden and his friend Sally go ice skating and then have lunch together. During lunch, Holden complains that he is fed up with everything around him and suggests that they run away together, where they can live in a cabin in the woods. When she declines the idea, it brings down Holden’s mood resulting in him to say “You give me a royal pain in the ass” (Salinger 173). This causes Sally to cry and Holden repeatedly tries to apologize to her but she won’t accept it. Defeated, he leaves and ends up getting drunk. He then decides to sneak home to see his sister but make sure his parents wouldn’t know.
Out of his entire family Phoebe is the closest to him. He love his little ten year old sister. Phoebe seems to be the only person that gives him clarity. There is a lack of being settled in Holden's relationship with his family which is reflective of Holden's feelings towards the world. That shows why he is so resentful, doubtful, and non-caring towards certain things that come to him in life. The lack of emotional clarity in his family shows how these experiences are mirrored with the emotional experiences he has with the outside
The setting of my “Found poem” is when Holden is thinking about his brother D.B. on page 154, and when he went to war, then wrote a story about it. Holden expresses an extreme distaste towards being a soldier and doesn't understand why his brother who hated being a soldier would write such a nice story about a kind General.
Some reasons why we can infer this is because throughout the novel he leaves clues that signify he is uncomfortable with changes and that he can not handle adult situations such as facing death, like that of his brother Allie. When his brother passed away of leukemia he quoted, “I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist...”. (Salinger 22/23) As a result of Holden’s actions, his parents thought that he needed to be psychoanalyzed. This supports the idea that Holden’s has not accepted his brother’s death and refuses to, just like adulthood.
“Holden says that he has a lousy childhood” (Salinger 1). I think that no one can understand Holden’s world since he lock himself up after Allie’s passing. The only person that Holden can trust and talk to is his little sister Phoebe. As Holden goes through his mourning and adolescent stages, he develops lots of anger and anxiety. This leads him to lose motivation in life and not care about others ex-cept those who he cares. After Holden flunked out of Pency Prep, he plans to go to West living by himself. “Before Holden start hitchhiking his way out West, Phoebe is the only one that Holden would like to say goodbye to” (Salinger 218). But Phoebe tries to go with Holden to-gether to the West. This freaks Holden out and he says that: “I got sort of dizzy and I thought I was going to pass out or something again” (Salinger 226). Holden cares about Phoebe’s educa-tion and expects her to be in the school play, instead of dropping the school and wandering the world with him, so he strongly refuses to go to the West with Phoebe. It makes Phoebe cry and doesn’t talk to Holden for a short while. At the end, Holden gives up going to the West because of
All of these obstacles in his life connect to the given quote in that his loneliness, hardships, and experiences of death have led him to treasure children and their purity, to the point where all he wants to be is the “catcher in the rye” for their sake. Without any ambitions, this is the single time Holden expresses something he truly wants to do—protect Phoebe and other little kids. Holden, deprived of it himself, craves the untainted virtue that these children all hold. He wishes to keep them from being exposed to the adulthood which has brought him endless hardships and painful memories. By surrounding himself with them and becoming their protector, he fools himself into shutting his eyes from his depression. This is ineffective because he is just continuously running away from his problems—problems emerging from adulthood. The previously mentioned setbacks weighing him down are only lightened by the presence of his younger sister, an innocent child, full of faith in her brother. Avoiding his parents and indifferent to D.B., the only one Holden openly shows concern for and thinks of in his family is Phoebe and her happiness. Likewise, Phoebe is the only one who manages to make Holden open up. Holden is looking for an escape from adulthood through
In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden’s ambivalence is the most impressive thing. He has ambivalence between his external expression and his wish in inner heart. For example, he says countless rude words himself, but when he finds the rude words on the wall of his sister’s school, he is angry because he thinks it is a bad thing. In fact, as a teenager who is superficially irresponsible, rebellious and hates everything, he still longs for love, being understood and tries to help others. Various of contradictions interweave together and finally causes Holden’s ambivalence. This essay is trying to analyze several reasons that directly and indirectly influence and cause Holden’s ambivalence.
While in the city, he encounters many people who he believes are “phony.” This is one of the main reasons why Holden is afraid of growing up, he realizes that adults are phony and fake. He decides to go back to his house to visit his younger sister, Phoebe, who seems to be the only one who understood him at the time. He realizes that he wanted to be a catcher in the rye, someone who catches innocent kids before they fall into the trap of adulthood. But when he takes Phoebe to ride a carousel in the park, he realizes that growing up is inevitable, and he cannot do or saying anything to prevent
Holden Caulfield’s rough childhood events are the explanation of his struggle with Maniac Depression throughout the novel. In the novel, Holden claims that “When you're feeling very depressed, you can't even think”
“The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. . . . Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.” -J.D Salinger. The novel, The Catcher In The Rye by J.D Salinger, is set in the 1950’s and is narrated by Holden Caulfield a 17-year-old boy how goes on an excursion to New York after beginning kicked out of another private school. Throughout the novel holden’s unpredictable and Paradoxical behavior point him not being a normal teenager and even being mentally ill. some people may say that his actions as those of an average teenager. I’m not one of those people, many of holden’s actions have shed light on signs of major depression and borderline personality
One of the recurring themes throughout The Catcher in the Rye is Holden’s indecisiveness and his indecision takes over at key moments. For example, the first thing he did once he got off his train in New York City was enter a phone booth. He knows he wants to call someone but he continues to deny all of his options. D.B. is in Hollywood, Phoebe is sleeping, he ‘doesn't feel like’ calling Jane's mother, he's afraid Sally's mom will pick up the phone at her house and he doesn't like Carl Luce. Holden steps out of the phone booth after twenty minutes, having not called anyone. This is a prime example of how Holden doesn’t have the strong decisive personality needed to get things done. The whole novel comes off as him just wasting his time and his life because of his lack of a definitive objective. This idea of Holden having an indecisive, objectiveless and procrastinating mindset is enhanced by the way in which the novel was written. Throughout the novel there is no strong sense of continuity and there is no sense of events following each other in a natural sequence of cause and effect. It seems that Holden simply has one impulse after another and has no sense of direction.
Holden constantly find ways to escape from the path of growing up such as escaping to a cabin or moving to the west. He explains that adults are phonies and they are so phony that they can not see their own phoniness and this is one of the reason why he wants to protect Phoebe’s innocent and stop her from growing. Alongside Holden does not want Phoebe to faced the issues that he faced while growing up ranging from sex to intimacy to death. Holden’s protectiveness is shown when he went to Phoebe’s school and sees a profane word written on the wall and Holden states, “ It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they'd wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them...” (201) Holden’s anger come from his thoughts of how kids would ask and learned this world and how it would be the moments of corruption of innocence and departure from childhood. Holden scratched the word off the wall as an act that he wants to protect children from falling into these types of sensibilities, moreover Holden had become more selfless. To preserve kids innocent is also a prime reason for why Holden is so fascinated to become the catcher in the rye and to protect the kids from falling into the adult world of sickness and ugliness. Holdon actively seek to find ways to withdraw Phoebe from the crushing reality of growing up but however adolescence is a stage in life that no one can avoid and Holden seems to be slowly understanding the matter of that. As Holden watches Phoebe on the carousel and he thought about how the kids kept making mistakes. “The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to them”(211). This marks a significant change in Holden as