The Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher in the Rye The post World War II American writer D.J. Salinger‘s masterpiece The Catcher in the Rye has shaped the image of a literary classic Holden Caulfield. As the representative character of the Beat Generation, although the deeply disturbed Holden Caulfield is a kind-hearted, loving and eager to be loved teenager, he lives in an environment without love and warmth, even worse, he will enter a facile, unreflecting and cliché-ridden adult world at the absence of understanding and guidance from family, school and society. Such a circumstance makes him feel lonely, failure in schooling and eventually leads to a state of mental collapse. This paper intends to briefly analyze the contradiction embodied in Holden Caulfield‘s character from family, school and social sector. It is that his contractive and dual character makes him want to be a ―catcher in the rye‖ to save other teens from being injuring by the adult world for he is the prey of the Beat Generation so that he doesn‘t hope more teenagers suffering from the adult world as him. According to most analyses, The Catcher in the Rye is a bildungsroman, a novel about a young character’s growth into maturity. While it is appropriate to discuss the novel in such terms, Holden Caulfield is an unusual protagonist for a bildungsroman because his central goal is to resist the process of maturity itself. As his thoughts about the Museum of Natural History demonstrate, Holden fears change and is overwhelmed by complexity. He wants everything to be easily understandable and eternally fixed, like the statues of Eskimos and Indians in the museum. He is frightened because he is guilty of the sins he criticizes in others, and because he can’t understand everything around him. But he refuses to acknowledge this fear, expressing it only in a few instances—for example, when he talks about sex and admits that “sex is something I just don’t understand. I swear to God I don’t”. Instead of acknowledging that adulthood scares and mystifies him, Holden invents a fantasy that adulthood is a world of superficiality and hypocrisy (“phoniness”), while childhood is a world of innocence, curiosity, and honesty. Nothing reveals his image of these two worlds better than his fantasy about the catcher in the rye: he imagines childhood as an idyllic field of rye in which children romp and play; adulthood, for the children of this world, is equivalent to death—a fatal fall over the edge of a cliff. His created understandings of childhood and adulthood allow Holden to cut himself off from the world by covering himself with a protective armor of cynicism. But as the book progresses, Holden’s experiences, particularly his encounters with Mr. Antolini and Phoebe, reveal the shallowness of his conceptions. At first I found it hard to understand the novel, but after I finished reading it, I think it impressed me very deep inside.