So I basically wrote this so I wouldn’t have to do the essay I actually had for homework and yeah. Holden is merely giving a unbiased warning and letting us decide -for the first time in the entire novel. He’s not telling us to care, but he’s not telling us not to care either. Holden is not warning us away from love, but warning us of the pain that might come with it. He says this not as a warning against, but as a warning to.
If you do, you start missing everyone.” He’s starting to get that negative feelings can come with caring, but he is beginning to understand that those feelings are inevitable and it’s worth it just to be able to care. In the end, by the last line, I think Holden was implying that he is starting to understand the complexity of the world. The Catcher in the Rye is essentially the story of a boy who did not want to grow up into a man and the struggles he experienced through that inevitable growth, struggles that are and are caused by loneliness. The cynicism and the lying is Holden’s shelter against the world, like what his red hat is to him. He both digs and tries to escape his grave, ultimately causing his inner turmoil. Holden’s negative feelings stem from loneliness but every time he tries to cure this, Holden’s defensive cynicism takes over and he pushes away the company he strives for. prompted by loneliness, he visits his former teacher but once there can think of nothing else but sleep and solitude. For example, he calls up his old friend to have drink and once there, becomes cold and mean to him. Holden, throughout the book, both longs for company and recoils from it. That downfall being the descent into reclusive madness he experiences. He is stuck in the mindset that the adult world is bad and the child world is good and this becomes the root cause of his downfall. Holden tries to halt his growth, wishing to capture moments in glass and living in them forever, yet in the process adds more negative to an already ‘phony’ world. He thinks that the world is a terrible place and that he alone is the one who can see and point this out, yet he himself adds to the negative in the world, for example by playing that needless lie to the woman on the train.
The adult world is a cruel place in his eyes, ironic, seeing that he adds to it’s cruelty, picking fights and excessively lying. This belief goes to such an extent that Holden’s deepest desire is to be the ‘Catcher in the Rye’, to stand at the border between childhood and the death that is adult hood and catch the children before they fall to their deaths -that is, step into the complex and phony world of adulthood. Holden thinks of the world as black and white, childhood, with his sister being the epitome, being the ideal and adulthood being fake, complex and ‘phony’. Even his older brother does not hold the same spot in his mind. He cannot take, and even hates, everything in the world except for Phoebe. Normally a mean and even cruel boy, Holden is unusually kind and sympathetic to children, especially his sister. Holden tried to stick to a state of childhood, viewed by him as ideal. Holden, suspended in limbo between child and adult hood, couldn’t comprehend the complexity of the adult world so he unknowingly let it affect his every decision in the entire book. I found that The Catcher in the Rye first and foremost was about change and growing up. Spoilers below, only read if you’ve read the book. I posted a quick review of it already (see the post before this one) so now I just want to write about it.
Ok so The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger.
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