Outline Of The Catcher In The Rye

Introduction

Holden’s inability to transition into adult life and his desire to cling to and preserve the innocence of childhood makes The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger an influential coming of age novel for adolescents on the verge of adulthood. Holden seems to see the adult world as a place filled with phonies and he wants to save his innocence as a child, and as a result he is forced into an isolation because of his inability to transition into adult life. The novel is told through the main character named Holden Caulfield, he talks through the story by explaining the experiences he had getting kicked out of various school, telling family members he is running away, and traveling through New York City.

II. Holden has trouble dealing

with adulthood priorities because all adults are phony and do not accept him.
Holden believes that everyone else, specifically adults do not mean what they say, Holden sees that because most adults in his life are not willing to accept him.
“‘At sixteen years old, Holden is a teenager who poses as a person who is at least eighteen. Holden wants to act older than he is, but he also loathes aging when this involves decline- he seems disgusted by his teacher’s weak condition at the beginning of the book.
‘... there were pills and medicine all over the place, and everything smelled like Vicks Nose Drops. . . What made it even more depressing, old Spencer Mad on this very sad, ratty old bathrobe that he was probably born in or something. I don’t much like to see old guys in their pajamas and bathrobes anyway. Their bumpy old chests are always showing.’(Salinger 11).
And yet, Holden himself is not the picture of youthful health and vigor” (Schulzke, 56, 57).
2. Holden thinks that adults are phonies because of the way they are always polite and either pretend to be happy or are just flat rude. Which is why he always calls them phonies in his adolescent mind

III. Holden wants to hold onto and preserve his innocence and is unable to transform into an adult.
Holden loves the thought of being a kid and doesn’t want to ruin that which connects to the adolescent readers of this novel.
“Yet Holden had to speak a recognizable teenage language and at the same time had to be identifiable as an individual. This is difficult task Salinger achieved by giving Holden an extremely trite and typical teenage speech, overlaid with strong personal idiosyncrasies. There are two major speech habits which are Holden’s own, which are endlessly repeated throughout the book, and which are, nevertheless, typical enough of teenage speech so that Holden can be both typical and individual in his use of them. (Costello 45).
Holden continues to suggest that age determines the way people think, and is mesmerized by youth and the thought of seeming ageless: “He is drawn to the Museum of Natural History, especially the mummies because they are mysterious, enduring relics from the past. He loves children because they represent genuine feelings, as opposed to adult phoniness” (Shculzke 101).
B. Holden enjoys the thought of being a kid, and reading through the book your innocence is still intact, the kids are not forced to conform to all the norms in society like adults do.
“The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. . . .nobdy’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you” (Salinger 121). Holden is obviously terrified of the changing parts of the world, and specifically it shows through all of Holden’s memories at the museum.
As he visits the museum before his date with Sally and thinks about all the times he visited there as a child.
The Museum seems to be most appealing to Holden because all the things inside are never changing and preserved to be frozen in time, a fantasy that Holden seems to wish he lived in. He is very terrified of the ever changing world and hates the conflict in it.
C. “J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye leaves most readers wondering whether or not Holden Caulfield finally succeeds in his dream of becoming a “catcher in the rye” (Salinger 224), that is, a savior/defender of the innocent. Critics have provided both affirmative and negative responses to the question, but due attention has not yet been paid to how his seemingly odd behavior toward Jane- a girl in whom he expresses interest at intervals throughout the novel- affects his final status. Holden invariably avoids direct contact with Jane, with whom he became close over the course of the summer two years before the events of the novel” (Freese 164).

IV. Holden is forced into an isolation because of his unwillingness to become a mature adult.
Holden’s lack of maturity forces him into isolation all because adults will not accept him.
“During the bedroom scene, Holden shows no uneasiness about his and Phoebe’s being there together in their parents’ absence, about dancing with her, or even about pinching her behind; the fact seems hardly consistent with the intense and barely submerged sexual desires that Bryan attributes to him at this juncture. The point is that such contact need not be corrupt. If anything, Salinger is setting a trap and Bryan has taken the bait. Salinger’s technique here constitutes a test (one of many) of the values and responses of highly personal ‘you’ to whom the novel is addressed” (Vail 117).
The loneliness in the bedroom scene created the tone of the part of the novel to be focused on a type of alienation that Holden seems to be a driving force and the novel almost portrays a lust for love that Holden desires but is too awkward to actually get.
Holden now depends on Isolation to save the detachment he has to the adult world and does not really understand why he behaves the way he does but cannot stop it. For example he tries to correct his loneliness through carl Luce and his date with Sally Hayes are made to be unbearable because of Holden’s lack of manners and utter rudeness.
“The first thing I did when I got off at Penn Station, I went into this phone booth. I felt like giving somebody a buzz… but as soon as I was inside, I couldn’t think of anybody to call up” (Salinger 59).
“Anyway, it was the Saturday of the football game with Saxon Hall… I was standing way the hell up on top of Thomsen Hill… You could see the whole field from there” (Salinger 2). The nostalgia of the field explains how stubborn Holden is with not wanting to accept the norms of growing up and molding to adult life because it makes the reader think that he actually enjoyed football in his actual adolescents.
Because Holden is so oftenly is rejected and was basically cut off from adults resulting in Holden resorting to isolation: “Game my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game, all right= I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side, where there aren’t any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game.” (Salinger 11). The meaning to the game is much more of a social status that Holden seems to miss because he cannot seem to grow up.
Holden’s physical appearance makes him act young however physically look older because he is in between youth and adulthood.

Holden likes adult settings and hates the fact that adults are the ones that occupy it.

b. In Chapter 3, Holden is sitting in his dorm room at Pency Prep, with an annoying friend Aackley, they are discussing Holden’s house: “‘Up home we wear a hat like that to shoot deer in, for Chrissake,’ he said. ‘That’s a deer shooting hat.’ ‘Like hell it is.’ ‘This is a people shooting hat,’ (Salinger 22). The hunting hat specifically symbolizing the isolation between Holden and his uniqueness that everyone else around him lacks.

1 . The red hunting hat is a symbolic piece to the innocence of Holden because the hat shows that Holden desires to be different from everyone around him, and he often doesn’t wear it if he is going to be around people, thus showing that the hat explains the major conflict in the book for Holden’s need to isolate himself versus the companionship he thrives for because he is a child at heart and craves the

attention.
V.

Conclusion

The Catcher in the Rye is a story that shows nurturing and helping the young adults and not driving them towards isolation which relates to many of these young adults. Holden seems to see that being alone is what he prefers, shows his longing for love, because he doesn’t feel accepted by adults and sincerely enjoys being a kid. The adults in his life do not accept him and makes him sincerely enjoy being a kid which makes the innocence of every child so special.

“The Catcher in the Rye” had already earned Salinger critical praise and a wide readership from college professors, to high school students, to supermarket book buyers. Within a short time it was on the required reading lists at hundreds of colleges and universities around the country, and it sold in the U.S. at the steady clip of 250,000 copies a year” (Smith 641).

Lying and deception seem to be a reoccurring theme in the novel through these hurtful elements of the phoniness used. It almost is a sense of self-deception because of his scorn for people who believe they have no weaknesses and his random lying habits and unwillingness to acknowledge his own flaws and how it affects his

environment.
The Catcher in the Rye in all is a sad story: “The Catcher in the Rye is not only the story of a young man’s sad spiral into a nervous breakdown, but it is also about a boy who takes the chance his readers do not feel capable of risking. His failure makes him all the more real for these same readers” (Privitera 205). Holden’s incredibly imbalance of life relates to the innocence that most children have because if you cannot move forward and change into being an adult you will not be accepted like Holden was not.