The Catcher in the Rye can be strongly considered as one of the greatest novels of all time and Holden Caufield distinguishes himself as one of the greatest and most diverse characters. His moral system and his sense of justice force him to detect horrifying flaws in the society in which he lives. However, this is not his principle difficulty. His principle difficulty is not that he is a rebel, or a coward, nor that he hates society, it is that he has had many experiences and he remembers everything. Salinger indicates this through Holden’s confusion of time throughout the novel.
Experiences at Whooten, Pency, and Elkton Hills combine and no evels of time separate them. This causes Holden to end the novel missing everyone and every experience. He remembers all the good and bad, until distinctions between the two disappear. Holden believes throughout the novel that certain things should stay the same. Holden becomes a character portrayed by Salinger that disagrees with things changing. He wants to retain everything, in short he wants everything to always remain the same, and when changes occur; Holden reacts.
However the most important aspect of Holden Caufield’s character can be attributed to his judgment of people. Holden Caufield, a character who always jumps to conclusions about people and their phoniness, can be labeled as a hypocrite because he exemplifies a phony himself. During the 1950’s America was recovering from the greatest war in the World. There was a cloud of forgetfulness after the war, people didn’t want to remind themselves of all the bad things. People wanted to celebrate everything, but some people like Holden Caufield didn’t feel all the phoniness is necessary to live life.
The 1950’s is so remanincant of the 1920’s, the world had just finished a war and it was suppost to be freedom and happiness for all. Everything eemed to be artificially okay. America’s economy was booming Southern California was once again known for its movies rather than a important piece of the War Effort, Paris was once again the center of world, and even Las Vegas started to grow with the help of the mofia. Everything was romanticised, they should have called the 1950’s the roaring 50’s.
Yet while all this was goin on America and the Soviet Union started pointing Nuclear bombs at each other, and independent countries formed out of the Colonial Empires of the British, French, Germany, and Spain. Its possible to see how Holden thought most people were phonies. It was a period of “not seeing the visible. ” Except for the fact that not everybody was blind, and that was where Holden lost touch. Holden Caufield the 16 year old protaginist and main character of The Catcher in the Rye narrates the story and explains all the events throughout three days of his life.
A prep school student who has just been kicked out of his second school, Holden struggles to find the right path into adulthood. He does not know what road to follow and he uses others as the scapegoat’s for his puzzlement in life. His problem is that he wants to retain a child’s innocence, at a time hen almost everybody tried to retain their innocence. Even though Holden tries to act like an adult at times, he is actually afraid of the adult life and as a way to escape life, he creates this character, the catcher in the rye, throughout his thoughts.
He feels that by saving the children from falling off the cliff, he saves them from falling into the adult world that he disgusts. He feels that this character can prevent the children from becoming adults by remaining in that childish world Holden pictured. “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in his big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around-nobody big, I mean except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. “(Salinger 173) “What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff.
I mean if they’re running and they don’t look we’re they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. ” That’s all I have to do all day. I’d just be the Catcher in the Rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy(Salinger 173). Holden exhibits the madness described before at often times hroughout the book and in the end it ends up sending him to a sanitarium. He knows he has become mad and he even tells himself this many times in the book; but he never really believes it.
One time in the book when he displays this madness is, “But I’m crazy I swear to God I am. About halfway to the bathroom, I started pretending I had a bullet in my guts. Old Maurice had plugged me. Now I was on the way to the bathroom to get a good shot of bourbon. I pictured myself with my automatic in my pocket, and staggering a little bit. I’d walk down a couple of floors-holding on to my guts, blood leaking all over the place. As soon as old Maurice opened the doors he’d start screaming at me. But I’d plug him anyway”(Salinger 103-4). This explains the psychotically disturbing actions Holden takes in this novel.
Holden becomes obsessed with death and dying, and several times in the book he wishes he was dead. “Again, Holden can’t stay away from the subject of the death of family members and the decay of the corpse. Even when he later goes to the Museum of Art, he winds up in the mummy room explaining about preserving the dead bodies of two boys and then getting sick and “sort of” passing out. “He knows that he has become crazy but has a roblem admitting it fully and this shows how he can be considered a phony. Throughout the book he makes remarks on Jesus and the Disciples many times.
He says that he believes in Jesus but not the disciples, he explains that his reason feeling this way is because he is an atheist. However the definition of an atheist is someone who does not believe in God. About the Disciples he says, “Take the Disciples for instance. They annoy the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth”(Salinger 99). At that time the Church was very important in peoples lives it was the basic cornerstone in the average American family, most Families attended hurch together, even those who didn’t attend church were faith based followers.
The role that church played was important because it kept hope alive for the people who weren’t doing as good as they should have been doing during the positive economic times. I belive that in Holden’s mind everyone was doing well, and the world was full of a bunch of phony upper-middle class people who thought they were all that and a bag of chips. Values during that time is what most American families prided themselves in having. What Holden was thinking, some would think was open-spirited but in all fairness it would have been a ac-religious comment to most people during that time.
To believe in God but nothing that accompanyed in him wasn’t a positive attitude during that time. Holden dislikes many people, places, and events all because of the phoniness surrounding them. It makes him literally ill. He is repulsed not only by the insincerity and self promotion of the “phonies,” “hot-shots,” “jerks,” “bastards,” and “morons,” but by the phoniness that is excellence corrupted”. Holden realizes all the flaws within others but he can’t see them within himself. At the end of the novel he complains heavily about the fowl language ritten on walls where children can see it.
This proves he is constantly seeking to appear older than he really is, for he is somewhat a child himself. His profanity is so innately intuned in his personality that he is wholly unaware of how rough his language is”. There were even a few times in the book that his sister reprimanded him for swearing too much. He also does not trust that anyone tells the truth. He prefaces his revelations with “If you really want to hear about it,” and “If you want to know the truth,” because he found few people do want to know the truth.
Holden encounters many different people, and experiences many dventures throughout the three days that this story occurs. He becomes involved with a variety of people, including taxi drivers, two nuns, an elevator man(pimp), three girls from Seattle, a prostitute, and a former teacher from whom Holden thinks he should flee from, in the middle of the night. He can never hold on to anyone he cares about; so he always finds a way to ruin the relationship by escaping, or destroying it. In Holden’s case, he seems to expect the worst, believing that the result of getting close to people is pain.
Pain when others reject you or pain when they leave you, such as when a friend walks off or a beloved brother ies . He also easily mocks certain people and the way they act. On teachers Holden feels that, “You don’t have to think to too hard when you talk to a teacher”(Salinger 13). I think that Holden was trying to be a realist, with the keyword being “trying”, he was trying to be too different. His instinct that children are the purest beings are false, he didn’t see things for what they really were worth.
He probably just saw them for their face value, for instance when he described not wanting to be a lawyer like his dad, he replies by saying, “Lawyers are all right, I guess-but it doesn’t appeal to me. All you do is ake a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink martinis and look like a hot-shot”(Salinger 172). The truth is that not all lawyers are rich and some can do very good things for some poeple while others are exactly what he was describing. While most people wanted change and allowed change in the way society processed Holden was trying to hold on, hold on to something not real.
Many would think that after all of Holden’s experiences and tragedies, he would go to his parents for help. However he does not, which shows that he must not have a good relationship with his parents if he can’t talk to them; Yet any many films and tv shows of the 50’s most parent-child relationships seemed to be closer than they had ever been in the American household. I didn’t live in the 50’s, but most of my friends parents who did seem to have had tight nit relationships with their parents.
If Holden had possibly had this he would have been able to reach out to them but for some reason he couldn’t According to Webster’s dictionary, “Phoniness is described as artificial, counterfeit, or hypocritical”. Phony is one of the words heavily used by Holden. He uses the word phony several times throughout the course of this book and he uses it to escribe the actions of others and not himself. Before Holden judges others, he should take a look at himself and check his flaws. Throughout all the encounters with different people in the book, he is easily the phoniest of all the characters.
Holden had a flawed look on life, he dreams of retaining his childhood which had no revelance in the evolving society in 1950’s America. This idealism explains why he is close to his sister Phoebe and why he was so close to his brother Allie. He does not want anyone to fall off the cliff into adulthood, he wants them to remain in the rye and if they go to fall off he will catch them. He feels as if he is the true protector of innocense, except for the fact that he isn’t trying to be so innocent himself.
Holden does not have any friends and cannot keep relationships. This is because he finds and exaggerates any negative aspect of all the people he knows or meet. The Catcher in the Rye is a novel, which gives us some idea of how an adolescent boy, facing the common experiences and troubles of daily life in the 1950’s may have felt. Salinger might also be trying to show the reader the confusion anger and frustration of loosing a loved one and of possibly the time period, and how it can effect a persons life.
