Meet Holden Caulfield: A boy who myself as well as many young people around the world can relate to
It’s a difficult world we live in. Ice, booze, social media, the erosion of privacy, the desperate obsessive quest for perfection. There are even emerging horrors such as the frightening re-emergence of Neo-Nazis, violence against women, rampant road rage and brutal terrorist attacks. Not to mention, global warming, wanton plastic waste, Trump and Putin. Bad news everywhere, especially if you are young, fourteen or fifteen like me, searching for meaning in this maddening world. I can hear Holden Caulfield whispering in my ear: ‘So, what’s new? Welcome to my world…crazy, phony, depressing and dangerous.’ This is not the first time Holden has spoken to me. Ever since I entered his world of teenage angst, frustration and confusion in J.D Salinger’s Bildungsroman, ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, I have realised more and more how much his troubles parallel mine, and those of so many of my new Millennial peers in 2019. We shake our heads particularly at the problems wrecking young lives from drugs and alcohol, to eating disorders, mental illness, and suicide.
Even family dysfunction is a major problem in our contemporary society. We are constantly questioning why our grandparents, the original feminists, civil rights and anti-Vietnam protesters, and conscientious objectors, have failed to persist in their quest to make the world freer, cleaner, more just and peaceful. If anything, many of these people of the 70’s have married, separated and divorced, several remarrying and divorcing again. Our parents seem a world away from their ideals of five or six decades ago as they abandoned their dream of changing the world to the consumerist, materialist ideal of career, money, status and lifestyle. We, the new millennials, have had our lives permanently changed by these materialistic values. We dream of academic success as the path to a professional career, with all the material benefits that flow from it. It’s all about ego, about the promotion of oneself.
One of my favourite scenes in the novel ‘Çatcher in the Rye’ is when Holden rings a former girlfriend Sally to organize a date and he realises just how pretentious she has become, using posh words like ‘grand’ and making sure she slips in the conversation the fact that she has been “out with guys from Harvard and Westpoint”, suggesting that she is already trying to secure her future by marrying a rich successful guy. I see copies of Sally every day, both male and female, chasing the materialistic dream. This is a big part of the problem Holden and many young people face today. Their parents work like slaves to give their children the best education but ignore the more important parts of child-rearing — moral support, affection…their TIME. It is clear that Holden suffers from parental neglect as they shunt him from school to school, just throwing money at the problem. He dreads going home because apart from his sister Phoebe, there is no support or even communication between Holden and his parents. He doesn’t feel that he truly belongs there.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (or PTSD) is a predominant mental illness that many people face in our complex world. 5 to 10% of Australians will suffer from some degree of PTSD in their lives. That’s up to 2.6 million people, half the population of Melbourne. Serious issues such as cancer, domestic violence, terrorist attacks, war experiences, road trauma, loss of a job as well as natural disasters such as cyclones, droughts and floods, divorce, failed businesses, bankruptcy, death of a loved one, death of a child…are among countless catalysts for a mental meltdown. PTSD symptoms include reliving traumatic events, being overly alert, wound up or restless, paranoid, disconnected from daily life or avoiding reminders of the difficult experiences that they have suffered through. These are only some of the ways in which victims seek to evade the truths that are too painful to come to terms with.
Holden clearly shows some of these characteristics. Three major events seem to have sparked Holden’s PTSD. The most significant catalyst is the death of his 11-year-old brother, Allie when Holden was thirteen. Holden sincerely believes that Allie deserved to live, and he is so distraught over his younger brother’s death that he becomes disconnected from society, which is a common symptom of PTSD. This also highlights that Holden once trusted society and everything that it had to offer. He believed society to be fair and just. Allie’s death shatters not only Holden’s trust in society but also his understanding of how the world functions as well as how he perceives others. With it, he loses his trust in adults. He becomes more judgmental of others and seems rather irritated and isolated at times. He is sometimes restless and finds it hard to concentrate on one single topic even for a few minutes, easily becoming distracted and discussing something else that is extraneous. This behavior is a symptom of anxiety and inner turmoil. He proves this countless times throughout the novel in the very narration of his story. It is clear that Allie’s death has scarred Holden’s psyche.
At one stage, directly following Sunny leaving Holden’s room, Holden “felt so depressed [that he] started talking, sort of out loud, to Allie.” He even confirms that he does that sometimes “when [he] get[s] very depressed.” He then continues to discuss dreaming about an experience he had with Allie. Reliving events is yet again, another symptom of PTSD. Focusing on Allie and resenting his untimely death places Holden in a space that increasingly distances him from the real world, a world he evades as both confusing and cruel, a world full of hypocrites, “phonies.” His perception of the world as phony is reinforced several times in the novel, including the suicide of fellow student James Castle, brutally beaten by school thugs, but those responsible left unpunished:
“All they did with the guys that were in the room with him was expel them. They didn’t even go to jail.”
For Holden, this experience reaffirmed his suspicion that American society was a ‘fake’, where even fairness and justice could be twisted and corrupted.
Above all, he is suspicious of people’s motives towards him as he has lost trust in their sincerity and loyalty. When Holden witnessed how his older brother sold his soul for Hollywood, he lost all trust in him as he was nothing but a common “prostitute.” Holden’s negative and disappointing experience of others, including his absent parents, leaves him constantly rejecting people’s help. At the beginning of the novel, he fails to consider Mr. Spencer’s advice about feeling some “concern for [his] future.” Despite “respecting” Mr. Spencer, Holden mistrusts him and doesn’t listen to him. In addition, Holden’s traumatizing experience at Mr. Antolini’s house when he finds his former teacher patting his head in the middle of the night may have been a panic reaction but, added to the other “twenty times” that he has been molested in the past, confirms and deepens Holden’s judgement of the world around him as fake — exploitative and two-faced — a world where his purpose was to be “the catcher in the rye”, stopping the innocent from plunging into the adult world of pretensions and lies .
Salinger’s world of deception was famously created by an earlier writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald in his epic novel ‘The Great Gatsby’ where the protagonist, Jay Gatsby, finds himself in the midst of a world full of the “foul dust” of hypocrisy, lies and betrayal, trying to survive in it yet all the while “floating” above through his extraordinary faith in love and loyalty. After plunging head-first into the perplexing world of Gatsby, through the eyes of Nick Carraway (a young man from Minnesota who happens to be the cousin of Gatsby’s long-time love interest, Daisy Buchannan), we can deduce that Gatsby lives in a cold world that cares nothing for justice. It is a world that makes claims to fairness but only further rewards those who have already been rewarded; a world that Holden Caulfield would consider as “phony.” After all, who survives the novel? Not Myrtle Wilson. Not George Wilson. Not even “the Great Gatsby” himself lives through the novel. Only the indolent rich survive. Those of the likes of Jordan Baker, Tom and Daisy Buchanan as well as Nick Carraway. These people surviving is not a major issue, but the fact that they are allowed to go on being careless, is. As Nick Carraway writes, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things… and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.” Tom and Daisy’s indifference to the negative consequences of their actions is what is being highlighted. Throughout the novel, they “smashed up” many things. Gatsby’s heart, Gatsby’s car… his life. They even killed Nick’s innocence as well as Myrtle and George Wilson themselves. Nick is disturbed by this behavior and this quote illustrates his sheer frustration at not only how much trouble they caused, but how they don’t care. They aren’t murderous and homicidal, they’re just careless. Fitzgerald shows readers that Tom and Daisy’s inability to care is far more “phony” than what cruelty would be.
Another instance that illustrates the “phony adult world” includes Gatsby and Daisy being very much like Sally, Holden’s ex-girlfriend. Of course, Gatsby was originally poor, but he worked hard and eventually (and questionably) earned enough money to be considered rich. However, it is how Gatsby did this, is what is concerning. He distanced himself away from his family and proceeded to go as far as changing his name from the original James Gatz, to Jay Gatsby, attempting to deny that he was even poor in the first place. He throws lavish parties, all for the sole purpose of getting Daisy Buchannan, a married woman who had once loved him, to confess her love to him in the present. Despite Daisy and Gatsby having loved each other in the past, Daisy ultimately chooses another man by the name of Tom, over Gatsby simply because he could provide her with more material comforts than Gatsby himself. This is important, as it shows the extent that Gatsby is willing to go to, in order to be accepted by the “phony world.”
Yet again, it is all about the promotion of oneself and the materialistic benefits that life has in store for one. Very much like Sally, Gatsby is attempting to promote himself to Daisy by branding himself rich and worthy of her love. It is almost as if the whole scenario occurs in a shopping centre. Gatsby is the unwanted product who tries ever so hard to please its user: Daisy, who despite knowing that this product is more useful than another, finally chooses another simply because it’s more expensive. The key idea here is not usefulness, but love. One person gives more love than another but is still neglected attention because of their lack of extravagance. Phoniness is a recurring theme in both texts, except there is still a difference in the ways the characters go about to combat this injustice. Holden outright rejects it and does not want to have anything to do with it due to his negative experiences, but it is because of this that society, in turn, dismisses him as being an angry and confused child. Gatsby, on the other hand, embraces it and conforms to his version of the phony society because it is the only option that he has left to exhaust. Overall, Holden’s perception of the adult world is extremely similar to Gatsby’s very own experiences of that exact same world.
Holden Caulfield’s actions throughout the text are fueled by the losses and the traumas that he has experienced in his childhood. He hints at having a history of being sexually abused and constantly reminds the reader of the premature death of his younger brother Allie. These issues seem to be immense burdens that weigh down Holden. He has a troublesome time of moving on and can’t seem to forget the past because he envies it. Holden would do anything to go back and spend those days with Allie again and being unable to accomplish that makes him “depressed.” It can be assumed that he suffers from PTSD. Essentially, he wants to stop time. He feels as though by growing up into an adult, one would become quite cold and careless.
He is afraid.
Holden is afraid of losing his innocent sister Phoebe to the adult world. He is afraid that she will end up in the same predicament as Allie. Most importantly, he is afraid that he will be consumed by the phoniness and that just like Jay Gatsby and Lucy Buchanan, he will be forced to conform to the ever so demanding rules of adult society, soon growing to become careless of the innocence of children who jump off that cliff, down to adulthood.
We all experience traumas and losses, especially young and innocent people. It is how we choose to deal with these traumas and hardships that truly matters. Yes, we do live in a difficult world and yes, we do suffer from various conditions and problems but there is no use in just losing hope and denying help from those who offer it. Holden chose to let those chains of denial continue to weigh him down. He did not want to accept the truth and move on. This small snowball of problems eventually rolled down the hill, growing larger and larger, abruptly concluding in the mental breakdown that he experienced. However, unlike Holden, we can choose to decide. We can build upon the experiences that we have had and learn from them- not sit on the edge of the cliff, ignoring society’s expectations and pleas, constantly refusing to believe that growing up into an adult will not change where our heart lies and what we cherish. It is our choice as people to either lose all hope in living freely or to haul the chains of PTSD, solitude, hate and blame off our backs and proudly grow and ascend up from the depths of realization of the phony side of society, into an adult that one angry and confused teenager one day, can learn to trust.
