Holden Caulfield Red Hunting Hat Essay

As the old saying goes, “If you can dream it, you can achieve it.” This sentiment holds true in so many things, perhaps most of all in growing up and maturing. So if one isn’t able to dream of growing up, how is one to achieve it? Holden Caulfield, the main character of J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye, is a struggling teenage boy who has just been kicked out of prep school and feels enormously alone in his situation. Because of this, he decides to leave his school and wander around New York City by himself before he has to go home to his family. As the novel progresses, Holden goes from struggling with viewing maturing positively, to ultimately making peace with its inevitability. Holden’s red hunting hat is a symbol of his relationship

with his own maturity.
In the beginning of the novel, Holden has a very negative view of growing up, as evidenced by the nature of the purchase of the red hunting hat, and the first instance in which we see him wear it.

When Holden gets back to his dorm room after visiting Mr. Spencer, he says, “...I put on this hat that I’d bought in New York that morning. It was this red hunting hat, with one of those very, very long peaks. I saw it in the window of this sports store we got out of the subway, just after I noticed I’d lost all the goddamn foils”(17). Holden buys the hat on impulse, after doing a very irresponsible thing in losing the foils. He ran away from the presumably very angry team to go and buy this hat. Both these things are inherently immature acts, showcasing the mindset Holden has towards maturity; denouncing it. This negativity surrounding the idea of maturity is furthered in what Holden does when wearing the hat for the first time. After he puts on the hat, Holden “...swung the old peak [of the hat] way around to the back-- very corny, I'll admit, but I liked it that way. I looked good in it that way. Then I got this book I was reading and sat down in my chair” (18). Holden stays like this until Ackley comes into his dorm and starts bothering him so much he

can't focus on reading anymore. Says Holden, “Then I started horsing around a little bit...What I did was, I pulled the old peak of my hunting hat around to the front, then pulled it way down over my eyes” (21). When the hat’s peak was pulled around to the back, Holden was reading quietly, not something usually attributed to teenagers. When the hat’s peak was pulled around to the front, he was horsing around, being loud, and obnoxious, not something that is usually attributed to adults. This switching of the peak, back and forth, symbolizes that Holen is very indecisively moving between both mature and adolescent acts, never sticking to one category. He doesn’t feel completely comfortable in either act, and if one is uncomfortable, it’s safe to say one has a negative experience. Negative experiences trigger negative outlooks, and so because of his negative outlook, he doesn't want to fit into any category, and therefore won't push himself to grow.
In many instances in the middle of the novel, we see the red hunting hat in situations of vulnerability, showcasing a slight change in the way Holden views maturity, becoming seemingly mentally undecided in the whole affair. While still at Pencey, Holden, who considers himself a pacifist, gets in a fist-fight with his roommate Stradlater, over Stradlater’s treatment of his date, Jane, who Holden cares about deeply. Holden loses this fight, getting beaten and bloody, and says, “I kept sitting there on the floor till I heard old Stradlater close the door...I put [the hat] on, and turned the old peak way around to the back, the way I liked it…”(45). This fight, by Holden’s standard of nonviolence, would be an extremely ill-fated and immature act. He does this in what could be considered a blind rage--he is emotionally crippled by Stradlater’s insinuation that he took advantage of Jane, and so he can’t possibly consciously be in control of his actions. He turns to his hat for comfort after this both physically and emotionally draining ordeal, and much in the same way he did when he was reading versus horsing around, the hat went on when he stopped participating in immature acts. He is still showcasing the negative indecisiveness we see early on. Later, after Holden has left Pencey and is staying by himself in New York, he sits drunk in a snow covered Central Park with wet hair, right after getting told by an acquaintance that he should visit a psychoanalyst. He says, “Boy, I was shivering like a bastard, and the back of my hair, even though I had my hunting hat on, was sort of full of little hunks of ice...I thought I’d probably get pneumonia and die”(154). Holden is vulnerable in a few ways in this scene. First, he is drunk, and therefore has an altered state of mind. Second, he has just been told, essentially, that he is crazy, by someone who has not know him well in years. And third, as a result of these mind altering circumstances, Holden is doing nothing about the fact that he could potentially freeze to death. The hat is not going to protect him from this fate, either. He meets his vulnerable situation with complete apathy, very frankly declaring he might die. His candor shows us that he doesn’t care about the realities of growing up one way or the other. The hat is not helping him, putting him in a negative situation, but the hat isn’t hurting him either. Holden simply does not care enough about the realities of his situation to positively accept it, and so his journey is not complete.

The events of the end of the novel that contain the red hunting hat are where we see Holden’s growth through the novel culminate into an acceptance of maturity. The actions that have to do with the hunting hat are ones of cleansing for Holden, and hold an air of finality. After Holden’s Central Park exploit, he goes home to his family’s apartment to visit his little sister Phoebe, to tell her of his plans for the future. When he leaves her for the night, he leaves the hunting hat with her, saying, ”She likes those kinds of crazy hats. She didn’t want to take it, but I made her” (180). Holden is giving up something he loves as a token of his love for Phoebe, which is inherently adult in its nature. Holden is cleansing himself of all the negativity that has surrounded the hat and giving it in love to Phoebe, creating an atmosphere of positivity. However, Holden is in good conscious about to go run from growing up, planning to errantly travel across the country. In his display of love for Phoebe, Holden shows the most mature behavior we have seen from him thus far. Be that as it may, the greater meaning behind that gesture denounces maturity, and so Holden is still stuck in a middle ground in terms of his attitude towards maturity. Holden finally comes to an epiphanic acceptance of the inevitability of maturity when he is watching Phoebe on the carousel. She has given the hat back to him at this point, and he has it on as it starts to pour with rain. He says, “My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way, but I got soaked anyway. I didn’t care, though. I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around” (212-13). This, the hat’s final scene is a momentous one, a final acceptance of the fact that he will have to mature. The fact that he stays in the rain, accepting the fact that he’s getting soaked even “with his maturity on” shows his revelation that he will face unavoidable challenges in an adult world, but if he has a mature outlook, he will be offered some protection. In contrast with when it was snowing and he had his hat on, the nature of his fully realized and communicated emotions show that he is no longer apathetic, as he has been for the majority of the novel. The rain cleansed him of his apathy, and so Holden is able to realise that he will have to grow up, but it won’t have to be a bad thing.

Through his experiences in the novel, Holden grows from having a very pessimistic view of maturity to a blithe acceptance that he will have to enter the adult world a mature member of society. These ideas are symbolized by Holden’s red hunting hat, which appeared from the very first scenes, to the last in the book. Holden now has the dream, and so he can achieve. One can only hope he succeeded.