Holden Caulfield Character Analysis Essay

J.D. Salinger has famously said that he is his most famous character, Holden Caulfield. With this statement, Salinger also claimed that while he is Holden, he is also Holden before Salinger went to war. Even though Salinger is the author, his own characters and stories portray him as they clearly depict a character who is molded and shaped by Salinger’s experiences in the war. Through his work in The Catcher in the Rye, we can see Salinger’s battle fatigue or post-traumatic stress disorder in his character, Holden Caulfield. With his other work, we can see what Holden can become or what Salinger has already experienced in the character of Sargent X in “For Esme- With Love and Squalor”.

Salinger was deployed during the time of World War II.

During his time in the war, he suffered through what was called “battle fatigue.” He would later go on to be diagnosed with PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder. Salinger would write before, during, and after the war. It would help him sort out what had happened during his service and in some ways, keep him sane. One of the characters that he would constantly write about was that actually born on the battlefield was Holden, but before he was formally known as Holden Caulfield. Holden and Salinger became seemingly entwined with one another as wherever Salinger went, Holden would surely follow. Slawenski would write in his article that “Holden is the first character in whom Salinger embedded himself, and their lives would be joined: whatever happened to Salinger would, in a sense, also happen to Holden.” A character born while being in the middle of something such as World War II would surely be born with the creator’s emotions, feelings, and views of the situation that they were in. That is exactly what happened with Holden Caulfield, as he certainly cannot be Salinger before the war if he shares the same conditions that his creator has experienced while he was deployed.
It is never flat-out stated that Holden Caulfield has PTSD, but by looking at his character and his actions, the signs are very prevalent and point directly to the disorder.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), there are a few criteria in order to be diagnosed with PTSD. The first criterion is that a stressor is required which can be onset by a person’s death, witnessing trauma, etc. Holden definitely fits that criteria as he is constantly haunted by his brother’s, Allie’s, death. Next are intrusion symptoms in which the traumatic experience is persistently re-experienced in ways such as emotional distress after exposure to traumatic reminders, unwanted upsetting memories, and physical reactivity after exposure to traumatic reminders. These are true for Holden as he sleeps in the garage and breaks all the windows with his bare hands the night Allie dies. Because of Allie’s death, Holden has a disconnect with the world that makes him emotionally cut off from his peers and adults around him. On the topic of cutting himself off from other people, that signifies another marker for PTSD as Holden definitely has overly negative thoughts and assumptions about the world and has a decreased interest in activities, which is shown by him getting kicked out of school and Holden seemingly not caring at all. Lastly, Holden engages himself in risky or destructive behavior constantly in the novel. He gets into fights regularly and tries his best

to act like an adult whether it be engaging in smoking and drinking or trying to hire a prostitute. According to these guidelines, Holden is a textbook example of displaying PTSD so why would Salinger openly debate against it and say that this character he created is himself before he could have even been diagnosed with PTSD?
For starters, Salinger has some validity in his opinions since he is the author of the story and creator of the character.

Holden misses one mark of the DSM-5. One required criterion for PTSD is avoidance in which the person would avoid any and all things trauma related to the incident. The manual states, “stimuli associated with the trauma are persistently (e.g., always or almost always) avoided” (American Psychiatric Association 275), but Holden basically rejects all of this as his trauma is his main driving force and he thinks back on it regularly. For example, when Stradlater wanted Holden to write his composition for him, Holden wrote about Allie’s baseball and even thought back onto the moments where Allie died. He carries around that trauma and instead of hiding from it, he parades it around and lives by it. He wants to “catch everyone if they start to go over the cliff” and to “be the catcher in the rye and all” (Salinger 191). This would seem to be enough to disprove the whole Salinger hides his disorder within his characters theory. Even though Holden has not been in the war, his environment and settings are similar to Salinger’s and he experiences similar trauma to him as well. Even though Holden does not have the component of avoidance, Salinger manifests this aspect of PTSD in another story. but Salinger does have another story in which he portrays a character with battle fatigue, but this time it is not

hidden.
In “For Esme- With Love and Squalor” the main focus is on a soldier who represents a character going through war and in part, Salinger’s perception of the war and how he himself changes through it. Through the soldier known as Sergeant X the reader is introduced to different stages and time periods that he is in and how the world reflects that. The first stage would definitely be a soldier before the war. This scene shows the mind of the soldiers on the last day of training, about to get shipped off to the war front and has a sense of foreboding and anticipation as Sergeant X’s trigger finger is twitching and soldiers were busy writing letters. Within the stage, before the war, there is a scene at the civilian tea room were the child and adult or at least civilian and soldier perspective comes into play. Esme says to Sergeant X, “You seem quite intelligent for an American,” because most of the Americans that she has come into contact with have behaved like savages (Salinger 10). X shrugs it off and says that it is because many soldiers around the world were far away from home and not a lot of them had opportunities in life. Salinger is able to show how the war affects various people and even how the war can touch the youngest and most vulnerable of us. Salinger further drives this home by showing that Esme knows the horror of war, as her father was slain in North Africa. During her conversation with Sergeant X, Esme realizes that all the soldiers, especially American soldiers may not be bad and hopes that he writes to her and, “return[s] from the war with all [his] faculties intact” (Salinger 18).
With the talk of faculties comes the next phase of the story, where the characters are now several weeks post-V-E Day in Gaufurt, Bavaria. This scene is where Salinger inserts his anxieties and battle fatigue that he faced in the war into the story even more as it displays what come next after the fighting is over. The aftermath of the war is prevalent in Sergeant X as he tries to write an inscription and Dostoevsky’s name in a book but saw that what he had written was almost entirely illegible. The antiwar imagery is also seen is this part as well, as seen when X rips up his brother’s letter after only getting past the part that talked about “sending the kids a couple of bayonets or swastikas” (20). Here is where Salinger’s coping and symptoms of PTSD tend to really take hold as he shows how Sergeant X hates what is seen as making light of what he has just gone through. X hates the letter his brother sent him, he hates that Clay’s girlfriend Loretta, is trying to diagnose him, he hates that her psychology class and professor are talking about him, and he hates that they can see what he is going through. Just like Salinger, X is dealing with battle fatigue and when he sees that Esme has responded back to him, he cannot bring himself to read it as he does not have all of his faculties intact. By not being able to read the letter or even open up the package, Sargent X shows the avoidance aspect that Holden was missing.