Critical analysis of book The Catcher in the Rye Essay

Critical analysis of book The Catcher in the Rye - Essay Example He is resoundingly negative in his view of the world, and his search for an identity is constantly filtered through his dark condemnation of virtually everything and everyone around him. The facts of his life show that he is unable to stick at anything for very wrong: he drops out of several schools, is hospitalized in a mental hospital, and seems unable to connect with anyone in a meaningful manner. This anomie is associated with two traumatic experiences: the death of his brother and the suicide of boy in one of classes. Holden searches for an identity through criticizing everyone around him. His word for them, one that has entered the language as a pejorative instantly associated with the character, is that they are all "phony". Virtually everybody that Holden sees around him is phony, and it is a judgment that eventually makes him turn towards himself. He judges people in a superficial way, and uses humor to cover the fact that he realizes how utterly alone he is in the world. The passage in which he imagines that someone will probably write "fuck you"2 on his grave his hilarious and yet deeply revealing. The fact that he would think about his own grave as a teenager, let alone the abuse that someone would write on his headstone, shows that Holden has a more imaginative and deeper view of the world than his resolute condemnations of everyone suggest. His cursing and his cynicism are perhaps a protection as, like many teenagers, he has no idea of what his real identity is or should be. This tendenc y is seen in the first lines of the book: If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me . . . 3 He adopts the pose of millions of teenagers who came after him: not caring about the world and all its conventionalities of biography, but accidentally reveals that he is surprisingly well-read. He has just been expelled from prep-school, and reveals that he has not only read Charles Dickens, but has understood it well enough to make fun of its conventions. Holden's search for identity throughout the novel is full of such accidental revelations of a deeper self. As with many teenage boys, Holden is obsessed with sex; but unlike many of them he is peculiarly puritanical about the subject. He admits that he is a virgin, and spends most of the novel trying to lose that virginity but also thinks that sex should only occur between people who care deeply about one another. Casual sex is an abomination to him, as when Jane has a date with a boy she hardly knows. At the same time, Holden reveals that he is interested in a much darker side of sexuality, such as the idea of spitting at a lover during the sexual act. Once again this reveals the depth of his imagination: he is a virgin but can imagine a particularly savage form of sexuality that involves humiliating and essentially hating the partner. He regards this behavior as "crumby", but want to indulge anyway. Holden's search for an identity is constantly hindered by his reluctance to move from his supposedly innocent childhood world of genuineness and openness into the hypocritical adult world of phonies. Here his name has important symbolic meaning. Caulfield