Every child is warned of the “adult world” where all the magic and fairytales of their previous years disappear, where enjoyment is succeeded by exhaustion and monotony, and where they have to pay taxes! During their youth, a considerable portion is dedicated to fortifying their emotions for their upcoming toils. However, what happens when life shatters this fantasy too early? Holden Caulfield from Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Franny Glass from his short stories, Franny and Zooey are two incidents of when the adolescent illusion cracks prematurely.
Both of these characters suffer from the death of their beloved sibling. Holden is an abnormal, introverted teenager who isolates himself from the rest of the “phony” people in the world. After running away from his “phony” schoolmates, he begins his adventure in maturing which was previously inhibited due to the death of his brother. Franny Glass is quite different from Holden, however, they both share a common cause of their issues. Franny is a college student who became diminishingly less social as she pursued her deceased brother’s religious passion.
Obsessively attempting to connect with her dead brother who committed suicide, she increasingly forfeited her emotional stability, mental fortitude and her social skills. Within Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey, he demonstrates the crippling impact of death on the youth through the deceased siblings, Allie and Seymour. The mental and emotional anguish of these adolescents which stem from their siblings epitomizes the influence of losing a loved one. Salinger articulates the vulnerability of children by the inclusion of emotional fits as well as explicit acceptance of mental uneasiness.
He provides the emotional outbreak of Holden and his inability to comprehend his feelings: I was only thirteen, and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don’t blame them. I really don’t. I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it (The Catcher in the Rye 38-39). Holden doesn’t understand his reasoning behind breaking all the windows once his brother dies and describes the actions as spontaneous rather than emotionally driven.
This illuminates not only the agony caused by Allie, with the information about destroying the windows but, also the undying childhood innocence of Holden from his lack of comprehension of his feelings. The quote also mentions him being psychoanalyzed, issuing that there were blatant mental problems following Allie’s death. Edwin Haviland Miller interprets Holden’s actions of destroying the garage as a reflection of his “uncontrollable anger, at himself for wishing Allie dead and at his brother for leaving him alone and burdened with feelings of guilt. (Miller) Franny on the other hand, has a sense of her mental instability as she explicitly states that “[she] feels so funny” and that “[she] thinks [she’s] going crazy. ” (Franny and Zooey 26) She is much more aware of her state of mind, possibly due to the few years she has on Holden. Regardless of age, she still exhibits psychological volatility with her lack of appetite, inability to focus on her surrounding and overall change in personality. These particular behaviors are resultants of the infliction of grief due to the death of Seymour depicted when she passes out in the restaurant repeating a prayer.
Salinger furnishes their internal torment through the character’s actions as well as explicitly through monologues and informative insights. Salinger encompasses Holden with specific values relating to Allie in order to display that he is desperately trying to preserve and remember aspects of his brother. Holden expresses this detriment vividly with his desperation to combat the corruption of juvenility virtues. To Holden, Allie was the epitome of childhood innocence and this memory of his little brother “is preserved forever in death. (Han) In order to remember and honor his little brother, Holden hopelessly attempts to sustain this purity during a time where society expects him to mature and consolidate his youthful emotions and mind. The preservation of this virtue by Holden is in all actuality due to his inability to understand and accept the mature content of the world. He is making an attempt to ensure that other children don’t follow this distorted path, and in doing so only alienates him further in his age demographic.
Han characterizes Holden as an anomaly who “belongs to neither of child and adult worlds” and is disillusioned by idealism. (Han) This disillusionment is youthful optimism as if he is attempting to neglect on the grotesqueness of the world and construct a utopia of innocence with his disciples. An extension of Holden’s purity is when he misinterprets the song, “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye” where instead of understanding the lyrics representing casual sex, he misconceives the song for a savior of children from the adult world, the role he wishes to assume.
Throughout the novel, Holden is disgusted by the abominations of the adult world and denotes those factors in which he doesn’t quite understand or disagrees on as “phony. ” From watching a man crossdress to vulgar vandalism on elementary school grounds, Holden displays his distaste for the corruption of purity and his incomprehension for such actions. The inhibition of Holden’s maturing process is in large part due to the influence of Allie’s innocence.
Although Allie’s image is predominantly characterized by his purity, there are also certain objects which Holden relates his deceased brother with. Similarly to the innocence, Allie’s baseball mitt and the red hunting hat is a way to preserve his little brother’s image. “I wrote about my brother Allie’s baseball mitt. It was a very descriptive subject” (Catcher 38) presents the emotional connection of Holden and his brother’s mitt. Parallel to Allie’s innocence the glove is a frozen frame of his intelligence in which Holden carries in order to perpetuate his sibling’s image.
The hunting hat is a minor connection to his red hair and also secures his brother in his memories. Overall, Holden has many references to his brother which invokes the longevity of his image alongside his inability to move on. Addressing Holden’s counterpart, Franny also adopts radical values from the death of her brother. For Franny, Seymour is the religious figurehead in her life and therefore just as Holden did with Allie’s innocence, Franny obsesses with Seymour’s religious diversity.
She did this through reading The Way of the Pilgrim, a book she found in her brother’s room, and applying the information within the novel to her everyday life. The novel consists of a man who repeats the Jesus Prayer until the words became attached to his soul. Aforementioned earlier, when Franny passes out, she’s reciting the Jesus Prayer as if she is attempting to achieve what the man in the novel accomplished. This signifies the intensity of her dedication to uphold Seymour’s theological beliefs.
Following the religious knowledge from her brother, she becomes devoted to all types of religions as her brother did and critically analyzed her unholy parts such as being egotistical. From these actions, Seymour is preserved in Franny’s world. Franny is not the only one in the Glass family who is moved philosophically by the death of their brother. Zooey, Franny’s older brother, also displays some hints that he has succumbed to a similar path that his sister is partaking. He also denotes some small intricacies which annoy him due to his older brother’s death. Just don’t smile at me, please, Seymour was always doing that to me” (Franny 136) exemplifies how death constructs slight nuisances which reflect the inability to accept that his brother is gone. Salinger’s incorporation of these small intricacies and reassessment of values display that the characters are clearly struggling to overcome the death of their siblings by attempting to reconstruct the image of the deceased or avoiding relating factors of them completely. After the deaths of their siblings, both Holden and Franny adopt aspects of introvertedness and social awkwardness.
This is an extension of how death has a mental effect on these characters. Franny’s sign of introvertedness is initialized when talking about how she quit the drama club even though she has an incredible passion and talent in theater. (Franny 28) This is a result of her critically analyzing the unholy parts of herself and denying the superficiality of her colleagues. This is directly related to Seymour’s death because once she overcomes and accepts the death of Seymour she returns to her normal self and joins the drama club again.
The situation is parallel to Holden because initially he isolates himself away from the football game (Catcher 2) and spews hatred towards his classmates, however, once accepting the death, he seemingly misses everyone. (Catcher 214) Holden’s awkwardness comes from him being an outcast in both adolescent and adult world. When addressing his classmates, he is scoldingly critical for having typical behaviors for a teenager and when with adults, he attempts to be mature, however, is blatantly childish due to his persistent grasp on Allie’s innocence.
They obtained social awkwardness and isolation as a consequence of their obsession with their siblings taking precedence over their social skills and appearance. The two also adopted signs of cynicism and arrogance as a result of the depression caused by the deaths. The arrogance is quite blatant in Salinger’s word choice, displayed through Holden’s utilization of the word “phony” and Franny’s dialogue with Lane about the incompetent people in the literature department of her school. (Franny 18) However, the source of this hubris is exceedingly more convoluted.
A possibility for the prideful remarks could be due to the inability for society to understand their emotional strife and this failure provides the two with the idea that they understand more than that of an ordinary person. Another potentiality is that they are so blindly devoted to their deceased siblings’ values that they deny all other principles. From a broad perspective, the arrogance and cynicism only supplements the deaths’ impact on both of these characters. Holden, Franny and even Zooey, all experienced the tragic aftermath of death and exhibit an augmented version of the strife due to their age.
Adolescence is a quintessential period for the consolidation of the youth’s ability to deal with the countless responsibilities of being an adult and the emotional struggle affiliated with such obligations. Alone, death is already a tremendous obstacle to face, however, losing a loved one during this time of vulnerability can have substantial effects on the overall process of maturing. Although these stories present the damaging components of dealing with death, they also demonstrate that these seemingly permanent feelings can be overcomed with the assistance of family and other loved ones.
