Is Holden Caulfield Relevant Today

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Every teenager goes through the struggles of wanting to be liked and not wanting to become prepared for the real world. In the book The Catcher in the Rye written by J.D Salinger, a teenage boy named Holden Caulfield is a person that struggles in life by the fact that he has been kicked out of several schools, and also the school Holden is currently going to Pencey prep school. One reason he gets kicked out of school is because Holden grades are terrible. So he goes on this journey to find who he is and to make himself feel better about who he is and trying to become the guy that he wants to be honest and humble in life. This novel still has a place for high school students of the 21st century for the reason that they can relate with Holden …show more content…

I wanted genuineness. I didn’t want all those “stupid” adults telling me how to dress, wear my hair, or act with my peers” (Parini). He has the same beliefs that Holden had about becoming adult that it is bogus and people should not be able to tell you what to look like, what to wear and how to communicate with the people you are around. So after reading what Parnini wrote and looking at his picture, he seems to be a lot older then a teenager. He was probably writing about his younger days and how he felt becoming a young adult and the connection he had with Holden. Even though Parnini is older and not a teenager anymore he is trying to get across that teenagers today can still have the same feelings he had and how he shared a connection with Holden that they both did not want to become adults. This shows that teens today are still connected with Holden as well on the fact that teenagers do not what to grow up and be told what to do and how to look as well. All of a sudden out of nowhere Holden got this urge to horse around to do a wrestle hold on …show more content…

The students can relate with Holden on the degree that they have had times in their lives where they could not connect with people at school or other activities and it creates emotional conflict with them feeling all alone and misunderstood. The universe is always developing in tiny ways but the major things in life seem to remain the same and especially in generations of hopelessness of not finding connections with people. There is no refusal in the emotion of feeling completely lonely and misconceived (Dougan). Through time, the insignificant ways of life is evolving while the larger things in people's life spans are staying the same, and there are periods in life where people can not connect with one another. Also people can not look the other way of feeling ostracized, so this makes people feel like no one can understand them at all. This is meaningful because teenagers can associate with this statement by the fact that they would have at one point in their life feel no connection with others like Holden felt at Pencey Prep school. From this it can make teens feel that nobody is there for them and can truly understand them as a person, so this can cause the emotion of being alone. So Holden is on the fencing team and they were coming back to school after their match and “the whole team ostracized me the whole way back on the train”

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