Today, over 60 years since its publication, The Catcher in the Rye continues to be one of the very most known and widely read works of American literature. Salinger, the author, became the author of one literary bible of the teenagers neighborhoods to come. The task confirmed and sustained his reputation and gained him a position as one of the more important American authors of younger generation. The book has been sold in sixty million copies and has been translated into over thirty dialects. It became one of the most convincing studies of adolescence ever before to be compiled by an American. The protagonist, Holden, converted into the ethnical icon in america of previous few generations.
The Cather in the Rye was publicized in 1951. It had been the time ever sold when Us citizens were scared of the eyesight of the nuclear warfare - and, more specifically, the bomb that embodied it. The makes that created limitless wealth, than became totally inverse and were able to eliminate this idyllic world. So almost everywhere in 1950's and 1960's culture the indications of revolt could be seen. The lurking doubts and phobias of the American citizens started to bubble slightly below "tranquillized" surface of certain American customs. Visible opportunity of global death triggered the manifestation of seditious protagonists in novels and movies. That's the way the heroes - outsiders who migrated between delicate mysticism and outright disaffiliation in their search for an alternative to the orthodox culture - course were created. Among these heroes Jim Stark from Rebel With out a Cause or Johnny Strabler from your Wild One and undoubtedly Holden Caulfield from your Catcher in the Rye could be found.
These protagonists (especially Holden) are children - they can be shifting between child years and adulthood searching for a place on the earth to have. This article will focus on the adolescence in accordance with The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger and it'll make an effort to answer the research question, which is "When considering Holden Caulfield's patterns, to what degree performed the seditious frame of mind towards the adult world protect his innocence?". Therefore the work will check out the connection between your protagonist's action and his will to stay innocent.
Among the most typical beliefs about adolescence is that it's enough time when teenagers form their personal identities. Egocentrism is being performed by adolescents which then forms self-consciousness of wanting to feel important in their peer categories and having interpersonal acceptance of installing in to the group. Holden Caulfield got some problems to get on with his contemporaries and this could be reason degree of his egocentrism was so high. He's an unhappy teen who runs from boarding school. And Salinger decided to go with him as a protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye for sure purposely. A teenager who is emotionally unpredictable is a perfect model to stress certain problems and conflicts. The clear issue is that Holden judges and hates everyone, but at the same time he wants them to become listed on him for a drink and talk it up for the evening. He seems perpetually caught in a limbo: judging a person, making a half-hearted try to touch base, and then being disappointed when see your face is not there to support him, talk with him, or make an effort to understand him.
According to the dictionary term "innocence" means independence from sin, moral incorrect or guilt through, straightforwardness and inoffensiveness, but also lack of knowledge or understanding and ignorance. Regarding to Holden, it is everything what's not the same as adult world and appears to belong to child years. But actually he's seeking for the particular innocence is and can't find the solution. So how the boy wants to preserve something that he even cannot exactly define? Maybe that is the key - when a person realizes what's innocence she or he becomes a grown-up.
Salinger wished to state an obvious relationship between adolescence and innocence. And he achieved it using Holden's homecoming. Adolescence is an interval of life when you start to realize the particular innocence is, and when you do it fast enough you will be able to try to protect it. As Caulfield do.
The Catcher in the Rye is written in a subjective style from the point of view of its protagonist, Holden Caulfield, pursuing his exact thought procedures. There is flow in the seemingly disjointed ideas and episodes. The book, written in the first person, is a masterpiece of expanded monologue. It really is all related in Holden's own defiant, ungrammatical slangy and cryptic wa of talkind, and yet manages to express great subtlety and understanding. The plot of the book is a three days long flashback period, where Holden confesses himself. Thus all the events that were mentioned by Holden are completely presented from the idea of view of the protagonist. Therefore the reader cannot be certain how exactly these three days had appeared as if. Holden is lonely, quixotic, compassionate, he is plagued by the 'phoniness' of his environment. And in the e book, he tells the story of his journey to New York and his eventual nervous breakdown. It turns out, in the end of the novel, that he's recalling all this from a sanatorium.
The book is a triumph in the vernacular and confessional function, drawing the audience into the narrator's deep resistance to the world that surrounds him and, he feels, threatens to stifle him. In addition, it offers us a hero who, in his unfortunately contracted way, reminds us of the numerous other rebels and dreamers, grotesque saints and would-be saviours, that populate American fiction.
Critical reviews agree that the novel effectively shown the teenage colloquial talk of that time period. The writer used few content that appear frequently in the book. For example: 'phony' means 'superficial, hypocritical, and pretentious'; 'flit' is 'homosexual', so 'flitty' means 'homosexual tendencies'; also 'crumby' can be found in the novel and that means 'inadequate, insufficient and unsatisfactory', while word 'that killed me' corresponds to 'I found that hilarious or astonishing'.
Holden Caulfield is a prep-school young man, whose parents are in NY. Holden in lots of ways exaggerates the normal tendencies of adolescence: he is hard-boiled and sophisticated in his own reveries but immature when confronted with a useful situation, he is quite simply good-hearted, even sensitive, but gruff and matter-of-fact externally, and he has a typical adolescent attitude toward intimacy: theoretically he's cynical and all-knowing, but in practice he is nave and chaste. His real difficulty, the reason he does not fit easily in to the life of the Pennsylvania prep school, is that he's more sensitive and idealistic than the boys around him - that makes him bitter and miserable and also to his teachers among others he seems a troublemaker and misfit.
But is there any connection between this attribute and the novel's subject? Indeed - it identifies Holden's aspire to preserve innocence: not his own - that, he senses, has already been lost - but the innocence of those still to increase up. He maintains picturing 'little kids playing some game' in 'this big field of rye and all', he tells his sister Phoebe. 'Nobody big' is just about, except him. He is 'ranking on the border of some crazy cliff'. 'What I have to do', he clarifies to Phoebe, 'I have to get every person if they learn to review the cliff'. He has, in short, to stop them from experiencing a street to redemption that recalls both mythical semester of Adam and Eve into knowledge and the common semester from innocence into experience, from years as a child into adulthood. Images of slipping and airfare pervade The Catcher in the Rye. Holden dreams of heading west or light out for the country. He cherishes anywhere that time appears to stand still. Similarly, he fears any kind of fall season, for himself yet others. At one point he event discovers it difficult, frightening, to step down from the pavement on the street.
The prominent theme of The Catcher in the Rye is helplessness of the adolescent - half child, half adult - within an adult population. Holden is too old for childish leisure, yet is punished cruelly when he tries to pressure his way in to the adult world. He is punished as well for his finer qualities, his level of sensitivity, tenderness are not virtues that are highly regarded by the normal inmates of prep-schools. In my own judgment the innocence in accordance with the novel's plot is mentioned getting over "staying alive" in population, as Holden witnessed using one occasion, you've got to say "stuff" like "glad to've found you" to people you aren't pleased to have met. So innocence is being unaware of the mechanisms that control the entire world, thus being frank to one's own manners.
Holden would like so firmly to maintain the innocence because he knows that even the best decrease to defeat. The majority are either victims or slobs. Decency may still be a conserve of childhood, however the adult world is repugnantly gross.
Despite all of this situations, Holden never makes himself out to be always a victim - as though he knew that this would hold the procedure for becoming an adult back. He doesn't appear to notice that he gets considered benefit of - consistently. This part if his own youngsters and naveterinary. Despite his judgmental external, Holden is surprisingly eager to please - and socialize.
Episodes home returning
Holden Caulfield uses the term 'nice' to describe what he wants just as he uses 'phony' to describe what he dislikes. Holden deems everyone to be phony. Just how can he be thinking about reaching people? /in his brain, many people are social-climber, a name-dropper, appearance-obsessed, a hidden knowledge slob, a private flit, or a suck-up. Holden locates any semblance of normal adult life to be "phony. " He doesn't want to increase up and get a job and play golf and drink martinis and go to a office. and he certainly doesn't want anything regarding the "bastards" that. Except that, really, he type of does.
Basically, if Holden calling everyone a phony, they can feel better when they reject him. Theoretically, of course. It isn't his problem the three young ladies in the Lavender Room weren't terribly interested in giving him enough time of day. These were just phonies who couldn't keep on a dialog. He can't feel bad if Ackley doesn't want to let him stay and talk. Ackley's simply a pimply moron. If Stradlater doesn't want to hang out, it is because he's a jerk. It's preferred not to use exhausted, old terms like "defense device, " but it is certainly tempted to in cases like this.
In section nine Holden is searching of his hotel windows into other rooms, specifically, a "distinguished-looking" man prancing about in women's clothes, and a couple of squirting water or highballs or something into each other's mouths. Holden declares the hotel is "filled with perverts" and launches into his thoughts on making love and perverts in general.
Holden sees love-making as inherently degrading, no matter how it's done. If he cares about a female, he can't have a erotic romantic relationship with her since it would flip her into an object. He admits, is the fact if you truly like a female, you wouldn't want to "do crumby products" to her. This means Holden has to either gratify his sexual urges with young ladies he doesn't care about, or not satisfy them whatsoever. The next problem, is that whenever he's fooling around with a woman and she advises they stop, he actually stops. Other fellas, he says, just keep going, but Holden actually can stop. Sex-related shows in the book are constantly ambiguous. This ambiguity makes them - as Holden perceives - phony.
There's also a theory out there - which felt very credible to me and possible since the first-time I've read The Catcher in the Rye - that Holden is homosexual. That's one method for why he feels lost and alienated and so forth. What strengthen this theory is just how Holden often focuses on the physicality of the male body (as with Stradlater, Ackley, or Mr. Spencer). You can say he reads homosexuality into others when it actually may well not be there (like Carl Luce or Mr. Antolini). And he's uncomfortable with the idea of making love with a female.
But Holden can also point (hardly any) elements of the surrounding world that are positive. As he telephone calls them simply "nice". One personality called so is Allie - protagonist's dead brother. Allie's death was one of the distressing situations in Holden's years as a child. He confessed that he'd busted all the glass windows in the garage area the night Allie had died. This confession can be an important one, when contemplating the whole storyline - it instructs us right from the start that Allie's fatality has had a huge effect on Holden's life. That Allie pops up over and over throughout the course of the narrative confirms this. The loss of life of Wayne Castle, too, appears to be significant, since it was the second time Holden experienced a close and personal face with death. Because of these occasions, Holden is plagued with thoughts of morality.
People with whom Holden can communicate - these "nice" people - are the two young children at the museum, the girl with the skates at the area, and Phoebe. All are - how interestingly - children, who can't help him in his growing aches and pains but reminds him of a simpler time, one to which he desires he could come back. Perhaps the most significant occurrence of the word "nice" is at Holden's statement close to the end of the book that the vision of Phoebe on offer and around on the carousel makes him happy because she is innocent. Which is so nice to him.
However, Holden becomes an adult and unintentionally he must get acquainted with adult world's habits. Nonetheless it occurs to be for him harder then it may seem. For example Holden admits that whenever he is given a present, he ends up feeling sad. During his stay in New York he gets injure. Plus the more he gets hurt, the sorrier he seems for others - what is not common action among the adults. Despite the fact that he doesn't like the girl whose occurrence makes him leave the night time club, he seems "sort of sorry on her behalf in a way". He is still a virgin because whenever he has tried to "make out" with young ladies and has been informed to avoid, he (as it was discussed earlier) has quit because he gets to "feeling sorry for these people". He even seems sorry for Jesus because the disciples let him down. Significantly, Holden supposes that the disciples proved a disappointment because Jesus experienced to pick them totally randomly.
Although Holden appears to hate everyone, he also "type of" misses people, if he doesn't see them for a while. And here the reader realizes (or at least should realize) "kind of" childish attribute of the almost adult Holden - of the adolescent.
Conclusion
At the finish, Phoebe - "nice" identity in the novel - becomes the witness of Holden's specific, break-down-way, confession. According to the melody about the catcher in the rye, who wants to contain the kids back again from jumping of the cliff, Holden explains to his sister the situation in an exceedingly picturesque and symbolic manner, but he essentially instructs Phoebe that he desires to prevent children from growing up. He blames the world's corruption on people and believes that whenever he stops the kids from growing up he will protect their innocence and (kind of) save the globe.
It takes almost all of the publication before Holden starts to understand that he is helpless to stop this corruption. Finally, he realizes that not only will there be nothing that they can do, but there may be nowhere he is able to go to hide from it. Holden requires a while to grasp these concepts. One good example is when Holden wishes to provide the word to Phoebe. He encounters a "fuck-you" written on the wall structure. Later on he detects similar caption scratched anywhere with a knife. He discovers that he can't efface that one. Even in the timeless tranquility of the Egyptian tomb room at the museum there may be another "fuck-you" written with a long term marker. This event is the beginning of Holden's realization that his dreams are unfeasible.
Ironically, it is Phoebe who troubles his intend to escape out west. As he is telling her that she cannot run away, he discovers that he too cannot run away. "You can never find a location that is nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. "
The protagonist's break-down comes near to the end of the publication when he is observing Phoebe on the carousel. "All of the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she'd land off the goddam horse, but I didn't say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them take action, and not say anything. If indeed they land off, they land off, but it's bad if you say anything to them. " Holden considers.
In the above mentioned passing from the book, Holden hits the final malfunction. Being "the catcher" becomes naturally unrealistic. The gold rings are ironically not rare metal but really brass-plated flat iron. The gold bands are symbols of the corrupted world which always "wears" a shiny surface to cover up its evil. It really is at this time that Holden recognizes that he can't stop children from growing up and for that reason losing their innocence. They will fall if they fall, you can find nothing that can be done.
Shortly following this point Holden has his stressed breakdown. His malfunction is because of this depressing realization that the earth is corrupt and filled with evil and all the phony products. He recognizes now with a sickening certainty that he is powerless to stop evil and maintain innocence (his and no one's). As a matter of fact, it is "bad" to do so.
