Maturity is not something that you are born with, it is a learned ability. The difference between kids becoming teens and eventually adults is the level of their maturity. However, some kids have a harder time maturing then others, and some just refuse to do it. In the book, Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, the main character Holden Caulfield is a teenager adventuring through New York City after he got kicked out of Pencey Prep. Throughout those few days in the city Holden has many encounters with different people, a prostitute, girls in a bar, Carl Luce and more showing his level of immaturity each time. By the end of the book Holden made decisions that could be seen as maturing. Even though Holden went through a little maturing, by the …show more content…
Although Holden proves throughout the book that he is immature, by the end of the book Holden shows some progression in his maturity. After watching Phoebe at the carousel, Holden realized that it was a better decision to stay home and tell his parents the truth about what happened, rather than traveling west, without realizing it Holden was making a mature decision. In the park Holden sat and watched Phoebe ride the carousel. The carousel had a twist to it, by releasing rings the riders could take a risk and dangerously reach out and try and grab rings with the hope of grabbing the golden ring. While sitting and watching Phoebe try to win the golden ring, Holden comes to a realization; you have to let kids fall in order to teach them to get back up. Holden says, "the thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it's bad if you say anything to them” (211) Holden is saying that you have to let kids take a risk and fall off in order to teach them; you can’t protect them from …show more content…
From the beginning of the story you can see Holden's immaturity. On the train into the city Holden runs into his friends mother; he begins to lie to her, telling her that he was not kicked out of school, but that he is going home to have surgery on his brain tumor. Eventually he ends up asking if she wanted to have drinks with him at the bar even though he is not old enough. Holden is acting very immature here because he is lying and not telling the truth about what happened, but also he is hitting on a much older women which is very inappropriate of him. Also while in a bar, drinking under age again, Holden starts to dance with three girls and begins calling them names. He describes the girls as “the three witches”, “three real morons” (pg 70) and he constantly refers to girls as ugly, “the two ugly ones’ names were Marty and Laverne.” He is so immature he is using name calling as a defense mechanism when they didn’t really want to dance with him. He continues to talk immaturely with people, when he meets up with Carl. Carl Luce is a college student that is a few years older than Holden and went to school with Holden at Whooton and was his student advisor.. Holden begins asking inappropriate questions about Carl’s
One wakeup call to Holden would be when he refuses to pay the full amount of $10 to the pimp, Maurice for Holden’s time spent with Sonny. There are many ways Holden could of dealt with this situation, he could of paid him the full amount after being told to, he also could of tried to maturely persuade Maurice to letting his debt slide. After refusing to pay, the situation takes a violent turn. Instead of handling that situation like an adult would, Holden decides to say, “I don't owe you five bucks, I said. If you rough me up, I'll yell like hell. I'll wake up everybody in the hotel. The police and all” (102). Holden’s disclosed plan to everte the possible next predicament is to yell. Yell loud so that everyone in the hotel would be able to hear him. This is definitely something you would hear coming out of an 11 year old, but not so much an overconfident teenager fighting with a pimp. It was an extremely childish way of attacking the situation and got him roughed up. On the contrary it served the readers a good example of how naive and stubborn he is to the real world. A change in the way that Holden is acting is when he decides to not go on the carousel with Phoebe, but to sit on the bench and watch. This shows a very distinct line between adolescence and adulthood. On top of that a symbol that
Immaturity of Holden in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye In J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the main character, Holden, cannot accept that he must move out of childhood and into adulthood. One of Holden’s most important major problems is his lack of maturity.
It takes many experiences in order for an immature child to become a responsible, well-rounded adult. In J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger’s main character Holden Caulfield matures throughout the course of the novel. In the beginning of the novel, Holden is a juvenile young man. However, through his experiences, Holden is able to learn, and is finally able to become somewhat mature by the end of the novel.
I would like to discuss how Holden’s misinterpretation of the Robert Burns poem, “Coming Through the Rye”, sums up his deepest desires by taking a journey through his troubled adolescence and his journey to self–discovery that results in his breakdown. According to Phoebe, the original line in the poem is “if a body meet a body”. However, Holden’s misinterpretation of “if a body catch a body” removes all sexual connotations from the original poem. Holden is a deeply disturbed adolescent in search of a way to preserve his childhood innocence. His “red hunting cap” is a symbol of his uniqueness and his rejection to conform to society.
Holden’s childhood was far from ideal, with Allie dying, his dysfunctional parents and the revelation that he had some “perverty” stuff happen to him when he was a kid. Due to this, he isn't ready to step into adulthood and leave his childhood behind. This is why Holden is mostly alienated from adults and connects more to the innocence of children like the girl at the park and his sister, Phoebe. However, Holden is disillusioned with both adulthood and childhood. He already knows how it feels to be an adult; drinking alcohol, being independent, living by himself and caring for Phoebe, but isn’t ready to immerse himself in it.
Holden’s apparent desire to be separated from the majority of his family and friends appears to have been triggered by the death of his younger brother Allie. From Allie’s there has been a downward spiral in Holden’s relationships, as he begins to avoid contact with others and isolate himself more. The reason I believe this is because we can see how immense his anger is after Allie’s death, ‘I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist’. The death of Allie has become like an awakening to Holden, and has alerted him how precious childhood innocence is, when Holden comes to this realisation he convinces himself to do everything within his power to protect the innocence of himself and those around him, to protect them from what he sees as a false adult world. Although Holden clearly fails to protect himself, as he falls into all sorts of situations which hardly boasts of innocence and virt... ...
Before this book was written in it's time frame, Holden deals with some struggles that change and impact his life quite a bit. The author portrays Holden's personality through his actions for the audience to understand him. Some of the actions are going back to visit the museum, calling and visiting Phoebe at home, visiting the park, keeping Allie's baseball mitt, wearing the red hunting hat, and asking about the ducks. These examples all play a part in showing that Holden is afraid of change. Holden is starting to grow up and make the transition into an adult, but the audience can tell Holden is struggling. Holden's decisions such as smoking, drinking constantly, buying a prostitute, and staying out late at night show his attempts to face adult life. However, when faced
Within the book The Catcher in the Rye written by J.D Salinger the protagonist Holden, forces us to view him and his actions as immature. He lacks the wisdom and maturity needed to be successful in a fast pace world. Holden’s adolescent mind struggles to keep up with his developing emotions, causing him to have immense amounts of social anxiety. As a result of these struggles Holden finds difficulty in taking ownership of his mistakes leading him to be seen as immature in the eyes of those who surround him. Holden persistently acts in ways that do not fit the certain criteria our society has set for young men. In a way there is a stigma around individuals that do not act in the way we wish them too. This factor also
in all but one of his subjects. He does not like to talk about his
In the Catcher in the Rye, there are many ways Holden shows reader that he is immature. Holden is afraid of the responsibility that comes with being adulthood. He acts childish and the and asks immature questions to
Throughout the novel, Holden is facing a big problem that many teenagers have to face eventually (their coming of age) and the setting that he is in makes his problem worse. His biggest conflict is that he internally doesn’t want to grow up. The 40s/50s was a very turbulent time period. Teenagers during that time liked to venture into adult like behaviors. They smoked, drank, and partied. Holden described how some wild things happened at Pencey Prep, a s...
We see during the novel that Holden wants to be able to protect innocence in the world, however by the end of the story he lets go of that desire. This is a point of growth for Holden. He finds that it is impossible and unnecessary to keep all the innocence in the world. While with Phoebe Holden says, “I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye...I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff...That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye” (173). In this moment Holden wants to be able to preserve all the youth and innocence in the world. He doesn’t accept that kids have to grow and change and that they can’t stay innocent forever. Later on in the story when Holden is with Phoebe at a carousel again he thinks, “The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the golden ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it’s bad if you say anything to them.” At the end of the novel Holden realizes and comes to terms with the fact that kids grow and lose their innocence. He moves from his want to be the “catcher in the rye” to...
The Catcher in the Rye revolves around Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of the novel, and his disillusionment. Holden’s disillusionment illustrates that he has a problem accepting such. Aforesaid is based upon multiple factors, most which have brought Holden lasting traumas. A remedy is required for Holden to accept his disillusionment and enable an improvement of his situation. For Holden’s remedy, the consultation of psychologists, and additional specialized health professionals would be the core of an apt remedy for Holden’s psychological and physiological state based upon the numerous causes of such and the everlasting trauma of some of the determinants of aforesaid situation. The origins of Holden’s disillusionment revolved mainly around the death of his younger brother Allie three years ago, of which he still experiences the trauma to this day. His disillusionment is caused by both
Holden and the Complexity of Adult Life What was wrong with Holden, the main character in The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D.Salinger, was his moral revulsion against anything that was ugly, evil, cruel, or what he called "phoney" and his acute responsiveness to beauty and innocence, especially the innocence of the very young, in whom he saw reflected his own lost childhood. There is something wrong or lacking in the novels of despair and frustration of many writers. The sour note of bitterness and the recurring theme of sadism have become almost a convention, never thoroughly explained by the author's dependence on a psychoanalytical interpretation of a major character. The boys who are spoiled or turned into budding homosexuals by their mothers and a loveless home life are as familiar to us today as stalwart and dependable young heroes such as John Wayne were to an earlier generation. We have accepted this interpretation of the restlessness and bewilderment of our young men and boys because no one has anything better to offer.
There is one event that unites all human beings. This event is the process of growing up and becoming an adult. The transition into adulthood from childhood can be very long and confusing. As a kid most of them can not wait to become an adult but once you experience adulthood you miss your childhood. The novel Catcher in the Rye shows how a teenager on the break of entering adulthood can get scared. Through the main protagonist Holden Caulfield, J.D. Salinger captures the confusion of a teenager when faced with the challenge of adapting to an adult society. Holden is faced with many problems as some teens