Holden's Indecisiveness In Catcher In The Rye

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.
Hamlet on the other hand seems to have a sense of direction but he doesn’t follow it. He was decisive enough to form an objective near the beginning of the play when he vows to

avenge his father’s death, but he doesn’t manage to go through with his vowed action. In fact, the whole plot and the tragic ending to the play is all a result of his procrastination of killing Claudius, which he only manages to do at the end of the novel when he decides to stop ‘unpacking [his] heart with words’. Even Hamlet himself admits this in a soliloquy in Act 4 Scene 4 where he criticises his delay in avenging his father’s death. He says ‘I do not know why yet I live to say this thing’s to do, Sith I have cause and will, and strength and means to do’t’, He is questioning why he is procrastinating and how it’s lasted this long despite having reasons and means to do it. His indecisiveness even goes so far that it takes all five main acts of Hamlet to die before he manages to fulfil his goal of killing his uncle.
So it is clear that both these characters are indecisive in their own ways, Holden with his indecisive aimless personality where he just goes around New York with no intentions or objectives, and Hamlet with his procrastination of fulfilling his goal.

Holden’s indecisive character is in some ways a reflection of his creator, J.D. Salinger. Salinger too seemed to have had the indecisive characteristic that Holden bore with him throuought the novel. Before Salinger found creative writing, he went to a number of colleges, but didn’t graduate any of them. This shows that he too must have had some indecisive nature in his

life.
Another obvious similarity between Holden and Hamlet is their isolation and alienation from the rest of the world. Holden experiences isolation by his relationships with others, his distance from reality and his own identity but one of the main ways Holden is isolated is from others and society. He is always separating himself from others, in order to protect himself from their ‘phoney ways’. A prime example of this is in the beginning of the novel when Holden distances himself from the others by sitting on his own on a hill instead of with the rest of the school during the football game. He tries to make up excuses for why he has isolated himself such as he ‘just got back from New York’ or he ‘was on [his] way to say goodbye to old Spenser’. He isolates himself from people because he thinks that they are all ‘phonies’ and they say things that they do not really mean. Holden seems to have an innate sense of superiority which separates him from the other students. This is demonstrated in his final confrontations with his fellow Pencey students before he leaves. He believes himself to be more honourable and “deep” than Stradlater and more refined than the piggish Ackley.