Why do people like holden caulfield

Holden is literally about to crash. Near the beginning as well as the end of the novel, he feels that he will disappear or fall into an abyss when he steps off a curb to cross a street. Sometimes when this happens, he calls on his dead brother, Allie , for help. Part of Holden's collapse is due to his inability to come to terms with death. Thoughts of Allie lying in his grave in the cemetery in the rain, surrounded by dead bodies and tombstones, haunt Holden.

He wants time itself to stop. He wants beautiful moments to last forever, using as his model the displays in glass at the Museum of Natural History, in which the same people are shown doing the same things year after year. Never mind that even museum displays change. Holden's fears and desires are understandable, but his solution avoiding reality is impossible.

Life is change. His feelings are typically adolescent, feelings shared by virtually everyone who is or ever has been his age. One of the reasons we like Holden is that he is so candid about how he feels. Previous Chapters This once understood, we can see how The Catcher in the Rye is both a funny and terrifying work—traditional distinctions of modes have broken down in our times—a work full of pathos in the original sense of the word.

Adventure is precisely what Holden does not endure; his sallies into the world are feigned his sacrificial burden, carried with whimsey and sardonic defiance, determined by his fate. The fate is that of the American rebel-victim. Howard Bloom, in his introduction to J. Rereading The Catcher in the Rye seems to me an aesthetically mixed experience—sometimes poignant, sometimes mawkish or even cloying.

And yet Holden retains his pathos, even upon several rereadings. Holden is seventeen in the novel, but appears not to have matured beyond thirteen, his age when Allie died. The dilemma, being spiritual, hurts many among us, and is profoundly American. Holden speaks for our skepticism, and for our need. That is a large burden for so fragile a literary character, and will turn out eventually to be either aesthetic salvation for The Catcher in the Rye , or a prime cause for its dwindling down to the status of a period piece.

There are very ambiguous elements, moreover, in the portrait of this sad little screwed-up hero. The only real creation or half-creation in this world is Holden Caulfield himself. If this hero really represents the nonconformist rebellion of the Fifties, he is a rebel without a past, apparently, and without a cause.

There is no point in multiplying examples, Holden obviously fails to see that his criticisms apply to himself. If, however, we think that his failure to practice what he preaches invalidates his criticisms, we fall into an argumentum ad hominum —we cannot justify our shortcomings by pointing the finger of scorn at our critics, especially if you do not wish to admit that we are as sick as they are.

Like many sensitive but immature people, Holden is not yet well enough in control of his faculties to see the application of his strictures to himself. Salinger is not offering Holden to the world as an example of what it should be. The popularity of the novel suggests, however, that fully literate youth in our society finds it especially easy to identify with Holden. John W. The innocence of Mr. He has objects for his contempt but no objects other than his sister for his love. He is forced, consequently, simply to register his contempt, his developing disillusionment; and it is inevitable that he should seem after a time to be registering it in a vacuum, for just as he can find no concrete equivalent in life for the ideal which he wishes life to embody, so the persons on whom he registers his contempt seem inadequate to it and unjustly accused by it.

The boorish prep school roommate, the hypocritical teacher, the stupid women in the Lavender Room, the resentful prostitute, the conventional girl friend, the bewildered cab driver, the affected young man at the theater, the old friend who reveals that his interest in Holden is homosexual—these people are all truly objectionable and deserve the places Holden assigns them in his secret hierarchy of class with its categories of phonies, bores, deceivers, and perverts.

But they are nonetheless human, albeit dehumanized, and constitute a fair average of what the culture affords. They are part of the truth which Holden does not see and, as it turns out, is never able to see—that this is what one part of humanity is: the lies, the phoniness, the hypocrisy are the compromises which innocence is forced by the world to make.

He remains at the end what he was at the beginning—cynical, defiant, and blind. And as for ourselves, there is identification but no insight, a sense of pathos but not of tragedy. It may be that Mr. It was easy enough to identify with his adolescent angst, but his puerile attitudinizing was something else altogether.

That was then. This is half a century later. The novel is commonly represented as an expression of adolescent cynicism and rebellion—a James Dean movie in print—but from first page to last Salinger wants to have it both ways. Indeed a case can be made that The Catcher in the Rye created adolescence as we now know it, a condition that barely existed until Salinger defined it. He established whining rebellion as essential to adolescence and it has remained such ever since.

Morris Longstreth, reviewing the novel in the Christian Science Monitor , Twice there is a reminder of Shakespeare. It could be debated long just how irrational is Holden Caulfield, as likewise, Hamlet.

Holden, who is the clown, villain, and even moderately, the hero of this tale, is asked not to return to his school after Christmas. This is his third expulsion and he cannot endure to face his parents, so he hides out in New York, where his conduct is a nightmarish medley of loneliness, bravado, and supineness. He is as unbalanced as, a rooster on a tightrope. He asks a girl to elope with him and then calls her names. These two examples will resolve all arguments that every couples get into a marriage too or later!

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