Catcher in the Rye

The novel presented by the author J.D Salinger, “The catcher in the Rye”, which was written between the late 1940’s and the early 1950’s, and published in 1951 by the publisher the Little, Brown and Company, is considered to be a really controversial novel. This novel is written in a past tense with a narrator that happens to be the protagonist in the novel, by the name of Holden Caulfield, who narrates a story, which took place in his lifetime around the late 40’s or early 50’s from a rest home few months after the events that took place in the novel. As the narrator is telling a story that happened to him, this novel in it’s totality is written in first person. The language used in this novel is very colloquial; this means that it’s written with slang terms used in the 50’s. Salinger describes Holden as a very troubled child, who believes that the adult world, which he is now entering, is a very “phony” type of world. We can also sense the variation of tones used by Holden. These vary on the kind of information that the narrator is telling the reader. Salinger also uses a variation in the narrator by making Holden an unreliable narrator. He uses the stream of consciousness to reflect Holden’s inner thoughts. Through out the novel readers can sense two sides of Holden, one being a person who wants to enter the adult world, and more in depth, has a sexual encounter, and the other one rejecting the fact that he is growing and that he wants to stay with his childhood memories and avoid entering a “phony” world, which sees as the adult world. Throughout the novel we can sense different motifs, themes and symbols that the writer uses to make Holden a reliable narrator. In this essay there will be a discussion about the 3 main motifs of the novel, one being Holden’s loneliness, intimacy and sexuality, and the “phoniness” of the adult world, which leads to lying and deception.

Through the reading of the book, readers can feel and notice that Holden is a really lonely person. This is a clear manifestation of a more complex problem that he has, which is alienation. This is a source of of a grave pain and a manifesto of his insecurities. The writer shows that Holden is a really lonely adolescent, but, the real intention of this it to show that he is trying to find company, but in the moment that he finds it, he shies away to maintain the detachment from the grown-up world. Holden tries to interact with several people around the book, but his attitude leads the people who he is talking to, to believe he is a very immature person; being rude, of, shows this by acting like a adult, which he is not. A clear example of this is his date with Sally Hayes where he tries to convince Sally of running away with him to live in a cabin in the woods, and when sally tells him that she wishes that Holden became a normal boy, he acts in a rude way which make himself look like a fool, and calls her a pain in the ass, after that Sally storms out in tears and leaves Holden alone. We can also see this in his conversation with Carl Luce, where he is extremely rude, by getting drunk and asking very inappropriate questions about sexual encounters, which automatically infuriates Carl and calls Holden immature. The only real interaction that has a good outcome is when he starts to talk to his sister, Phoebe. We can see how Phoebe tries to talk some sense into her brother, by telling him that he has no ambitions since Ally died. But when Phoebe tells Holden that she wants to go with him to hitchhike in the west he prohibits her to go with him even though Phoebe is the only person that makes him happy throughout the story.

A recurrent thought on Holden’s mind is growing up, to become an adult, to take several new responsibilities that he has to face in this “new” world he is traveling through and becoming a part of. A very big part of it is his sexual identity and his intimacy problems. These relationships offer Holden to break out from his self constructed armour of hidden feelings and to be free from all his alienation problems, but as he puts it in the museum, he likes things to remain static and frozen, even though if it means being alone. But due to the fact that people are not silent, they are not static or frozen, and given that, as mentioned before, Holden reacts in a very awkward and rude way when people try to establish a conversation with him, they become, what Holden would call, unpredictable. At that moment he starts loosing a lot of self-confidence and he starts to question himself. We can see that there are moments in which Holden could have had some sort of intimate encounters,