Holden Caulfield Grief

The past is like a skeleton in your closet. It lurks there, in the back of your mind, impacting everyday actions and creeping into places it shouldn’t be. Its influence poses a threat to the present, and to be able to fully move forward, you must come to terms with it. Holden Caulfield of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is all too familiar with skeletons. After the loss of his brother to leukemia, Holden has suffered from grief. Throughout the novel, Holden contends with the survivor’s guilt he feels from growing up without Allie, and he subsequently fears his ascent into adulthood and forming relationships, revealing that if not properly addressed, grief can push individuals into mental illness and towards the brink of sanity.

Holden’s

grief over the death of his younger brother has led him to punish himself and those around him. The first occurence of this comes the night Allie died. “I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it” (Salinger, 50), Holden tells his audience. This behavior is exhibative of someone who is in serious anguish and cannot control his own actions. Holden does this as a form of retribution for Allie. He breaks the windows to punish the world for its cruel nature, his parents for their inability to keep his brother alive, and, mostly, himself for being unable to save Allie or even to take his place. Holden often makes reference to how smart and good natured Allie was, and in the face of his own inability to make friends and stay in school, Holden perhaps believes Allie should have been the one to stay alive. Even though the world does not work like that, Holden is a young boy, so he punishes himself for lack of knowing better. This self-punishment is only the beginning of the deep-seated guilt Holden feels, and because he is so young and does not have a way to cope, his grief follows him as he matures. For instance, Holden eggs Stradlater on after writing an essay for him over Allie’s baseball mitt. Overcome by the barely suppressed grief let loose by thinking about Allie, Holden feels the need to be punished and says things he knows will anger his roommate until he beats Holden up. Holden forces this physical attack on himself because he feels survivor’s guilt for outliving his little brother and needs someone to deliver his penance. With these actions, it is clear Holden is mentally ill and walking the fine line of sanity and absolute madness.

His grief has festered, going unchecked by the adults and role models in his life. In Mentor Mori; or Sibling Society and the Catcher in the Bly by Robert Miltner, the author asserts that it is this lack of role models that has sent Holden towards this edge. He has no one in his life to model his own grief and healing after, so he wallows in it. Although, one person almost came close to helping heal Holden’s grief. “It was D. B. who functioned as Holden's surrogate by attending Allie's funeral when Holden was still in the hospital from hurting his hand by breaking the garage windows the night Allie died, and it is through D. B.'s eyes--"D. B. told me. I wasn't there" (155)--that Holden waked his little brother” (Miltner). Being in the hospital exacerbated Holden’s grief. He wasn’t able to save Allie, and he wasn’t even able to see him to a better life, but D.B., Holden’s brother, is the one family member to realize Holden’s critical need of help. He recounts the funeral in hopes of giving Holden some amount of closure, and it might have worked out if D.B. had not abandoned his brother by joining the phony adult world as a screenwriter. Holden feels an utter sense of betrayal during a time he

needed a role model most.

Holden’s self-punishment had landed him in the hospital, forcing him to miss Allie’s funeral, which could have offered him an immense amount of comfort. Instead, Holden is left with survivor’s guilt that is even greater than before. While D.B. had begun to help Holden in the healing process, he is unable to see it through to completion. Holden is incapable of coming to terms with Allie’s death, just as he wasn’t able to see Allie’s burial. This lack of closure enables his past guilt to stay with him into the future, leaving Allie’s death as something Holden must always contend with. It has shaped and molded him into the extremely unhealthy and bereaved person that he is during the events of The Catcher in The Rye. His guilt has forced him closer and closer to a mental break down, and eventually, after Holden’s first full day in the city, the mental collapse sets in. Holden enters a deranged state and believes he is about to die of pneumonia as he sits in Central Park next to the lagoon of ducks, which is representative of Holden’s fear of change. “In this fantasy he acts out his anger against his parents and inflicts upon them the ultimate punishment, his death” (Miller). Holden’s

breakdown illuminates an obsession with death that Allie has left him with. His off-hand comments about feeling lonely and wishing he were dead culminate in a fantasy of actually dying and joining Allie, allowing him to finally feel reprieve from the survivor’s guilt he has lived with for three years. This fantasy also serves as a way for Holden to punish those around him. His family would have to deal with another death and the guilt that Holden has dealt with. This penalty is especially directed at his parents for their inability to save Allie all those years ago and for abandoning Holden in his grief. Holden believes that if he were dead, he may actually get the attention that had been denied to him by his absent father and nervous mother. His rage towards the world takes form as anger against his parents. He needs someone to feel the guilt that he feels, and his parents make excellent targets, but in the end, Holden realizes that his own death is futile. It is only him that hasn’t moved on from Allie’s death, and the rest of his family would mourn him just as much as they mourned Allie. It is only Holden who feels this gargantuan survivor’s guilt. He is young and has no one to tell him that he is not responsible, so his remorse follows him as he ages, growing as he grows. It is like Romeo and Juliet, a play which Holden enjoyed reading. Mercutio is Allie, leaving the play too early, and “like Romeo, Holden is guilty because he has gone on living after Allie's death, and like Romeo he cannot really be accused of being at fault” (Shaw). When Holden brings up this Shakespearean play to the nuns, his survivor’s guilt is evident. He feels an attachment to the character Mercutio because Mercutio dies in only act three, shouting “a plague o’ both your houses” (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet). Allie’s life too was cut too short, he and has left Holden with a plague of survivor’s guilt. It is clear that Allie’s death is haunting him, pushing him towards a mental illness that has been born from his fixation. He constantly has to address his mental state and work through the emotions that are brought up by even the littlest things that remind him of his brother. His grief has gone unaddressed, consuming every thought and action of Holden’s current existence.