Right and Wrong

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A father as a role model is crucial in a boy’s transition into manhood. When a father guides his son from child to adult and still maintains power over his son, he succeeds. In Homer’s The Odyssey, we see how without Odysseus, Telemachus is still a childish, and how with the mentorship of Athena, who is disguised as a man, he is able to resemble his father and not overpower him. Similarly in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Holden is very childish as he has no role model to follow. Holden seeks them out although, they give him irrelevant advice for his voyage to adulthood. However, because Holden is having trouble finding viable advice, he is negatively influenced by the movies. The reader is now able to see Telemachus and Holden both look to mentors for the guidance that they do not receive from their fathers, but while disguised Athena helps Telemachus to become a more like his father and a man as they are seen in society, Holden’s would-be mentors fail him because he is given bad advice such as when Mr. Spencer fails to give him advice for the future and Mr. Antolini’s misunderstood intimacy and is left with the entertainment industry for mentorship . Contrasting the roles that mentor characters play in the two novels highlights a fundamental difference between them: unlike The Odyssey, The Catcher in the Rye implies without the father figure in place, boys are left to turn to the movies for guidance into manhood.
In both novels it is clear without fathers the hero is helpless. In the case of The Odyssey, Telemachus has grown up his entire life with his father away after the trojan war. Telemachus clearly demonstrates the detrimental effects of no father figure, as he acts very childish and is looking for someone to fill th...

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... he’d start screaming at me, in this very high pitched, yellow-belly voice. […] But I’d plug him anyway” (136). Holden pictures Maurice will be “screaming” in a “very high-pitched” voice, demonstrating how now Holden is a man because he posses a phallic symbol and Maurice has nothing to counter with. However, Holden realizes the fantasy is farfetched and finishes his dream of killing Maurice by thinking much more logically and says, “The goddam movies. They can ruin you.” (136). Here we see Holden coming to terms with how he understands the failure of the movies as mentors, but he is so desperate that he is willing to let them “ruin” him. In addition, the self proclaimed “most terrific liar you ever saw in your life” says, “I’m not kidding” which helps the reader understand how serious Holden is being about the potential for boys to find improper guidance in them.

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