An Analysis of Holden’s Growing Path of Life.doc

An Analysis of Holdens Growing Path of LifeI. IntroductionThe Catcher in the Ray is the only novel written by J. D. Salinger. With its publication in 1951, J. D. Salinger becomes one of the most significant Post-World II American novelists. The novel immediately becomes very popular in America soon after its publication and has been reprinted again and again. In one from or another, Salinger is Everybodys favorite with that audience of students, students intellectuals, instructors, and generally literary, sensitive, and sophisticated young people who respond to him with a consciousness that he speaks for them and virtually to them, in a language that is peculiarly honest and their own, with a vision of things that captures their most secret judgments of the world. (Harold 2)The Catcher in the Rye narrates a series of picaresque adventures of a sixteen-year-old boy in the New York for three days. It belongs to the American initiation story and has a very important status in the literature. American initiation story is a novel genre, which attaches great importance to growing up problems of the adolescence, but it has its own features in terms of narrative structure, plot and protagonists. The protagonist Holden Caulfield became a legendary figure, and his acute adolescent awareness is the same as most sensitivity young Americans.Since its publication, The Catcher in the Rye is a controversial literary work. Some very famous literary critics including John Aldridge, Maxwell Geismar, Leslie Fiedler, Grederick Gwymn even doubted at the value of The Catcher in the Rye. This situation lasts until Warren French publishes his first work on Salinger: J. D. Salinger. Additional criticism of The Catcher in the Rye concentrated on the language, narrative structure, and cultural continuity compared with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the education or initiation of an adolescent, and Holdens awareness crisis.And this paper will be dissertation to analyze the growing path of Holden in The Catcher in the Rye. How can he get over the growing crisis from “rebellion” to “final enlightenment?” Especially “nature”, which Holden is actually searching for, contains the external nature world and an innocent world in his fantasy. After Post-world War, more and more young people faced on the main-adolescence growing up crisis in the America. During adolescence, boys and girls go through the biological, Psychological, and social changes necessary to prepare themselves to successfully meet the challenges of the next stage of development, namely, adulthood. Rogers explains it more exactly, “Adolescence is a processa process of achieving the attitudes and beliefs needed for effective participation in society.” (Rogers 5) But, they didnt suit the changes from young to the marital adult. Holden is such an adolescent, he fails in school, uses vulgar expressions, gets drunk, and is very interested in sex. He may be considered to have low moral standards. Although these common adolescent characteristics may not fit in with the idealistic conception of a teenager. On one hand, Holden finds the innocence of children and wants to be a protector of the innocence; on the other hand, he must be growing up and gets into the dilemma between the childhood and the adulthood. He refuses the traditions of school in which they focus on educating people materialistically, lacking depth and warmth. His loneliness and rebellion come from his passive rejection of the false conventions and phonies that surrounded him. However, no matter whatever the rebellion of Holden, he is not to overthrow society. So at the end of the novel, the red hunting hat cant stop the pouring rain; Holden has the wet clothes. Holden must be inevitably going back under the help of Phoebe. II. Growing PainAdolescents CrisisAdolescents are in marginal situation; it represents a special period of human development, a fascinating transitional period in which adolescence undergoes many changes and bears the great responsibility for further development into adulthood. But adolescence didnt suit the changes for these years, causing great disorder and disarray, as an interruption of peaceful growth, and as perilous, Holden is in such a situation. He “does not refuse to grow up as much as he agonizes over the state of being grown up.” (Galloway 140) Standing at the door of growing into maturity, he finds that the surroundings are a phony world. He cant understand the world and wants to preserve the innocence childhood. And then the sensitive adolescent is trapped in the dilemma between pure childhood and phony adulthood, between his inner innocence and the outside experience.A. The Phony World in Holdens EyesIn this novel, readers find that one of the most frequently used words in Holdens remarks is “phony”. The schools are phony, teachers are phony, the sponsors are phony, and the students are phony too. “Phony” is a slang word, meaning “sham, unreal, pretended, and not genuine”. From this frequently used word “phony”, it can not be difficult to find out that Holden was constantly detecting sham and “lousy” motives in the people around him.At the beginning of the story, Holden was separated himself of others, sitting on the top of a hill “cold like hell”. He was flunked out of Pencey. This is the fourth one. Because he failed four out five of his classes and has received notice that he is being expelled. The other reason for Holdens running away probably is that he cannot understand the people of the school. In adult eyes, Pencey is a school, which has “a very good academic rating”, (Salinger 8) but Holden describes it as “full of crooks”, and “Quit a few guys came from these very wealthy families, but it was full of crooks anyway. Pencey is an expensive school, but there are also more thieves. The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has.” (Salinger 8) Even “Old Thurmer”, interrupts his class to “crack a lot of crony jokes”. Spencer would “practically kill himself chunking and smiling”. (Salinger 168)And in Chapter 22, Holden sneaks back home and has a long talk with his sister Phoebe. Knowing that Holden is really expelled from school, Phoebe asks him to give a reason for his quitting. He says:Oh, God, Phoebe, dont ask me. Im sick of everybody asking me that. A million reasons why. It was one of the worse schools I ever went to. It was full of phonies. And mean guys. You never saw so many mean guys in your life. For instanceI dont even feel like talking about it. It was a stinking school. (Salinger 174)From the words of Holden, readers can find that Holden is despaired of the schools which are no longer places where one would desire of understanding to harvest the fruits of truth, knowledge, and love. All schools are workshops producing more and more “phonies”. The phony surroundings of school let him escaping from school to New York.But, what has he experience in New York? If the world of Pencey is “full of crooks”, the world of New York is an insistent Hell. Through the hotel window, he looks out upon the scenes of perversion: a distinguished-looking guy puts on womens clothes, and a man and woman squirt distortion water out of their mouth at each other. In bars and night clubs he hears only the laconic accents of shallow super-sophisticated or self-satisfied intellectuals. He says: “Its one of those places that are supposed to be very sophisticated and all, and the phonies are coming in the window”. “If you sat around there long enough and heard all the phonies applauding and all, you got to hate everything in the world, I swear you did.” (Salinger 148) Furthermore, the bar is full of any kinds of people including flits in “the other end of the bar.” Even the bartender “was a louse, too. He was a big snob. If you were a big shot or celebrity or something, then he was even more nauseating. Hed go up to you and say, with his big charming smile, like he was a helluva swell guy.” (Salinger 148)B. Dilemma between childhood and adulthoodAfter reading the novel, readers find that Holden world is a world of innocence, a childs world. He doesnt want to get into the “phony” adult world. And it likes Erikson explained in detail, “The adolescent mind is essentially a mind of morality learned by the child, and the ethics to be developed by the adult.” (Erikson 90) It is a period in which disaffection is inevitable as the adolescents discover that their idealized childhood values clash with real-world pragmatism. There is a sudden jump from the cherish ideals and beliefs of childhood to the inauthentic social reality of adulthood. Holden, at sixteen, is supposed to be ready to leave his innocence and move forward to the adult world. But he resists the movements and changes, because those mature people are phony and foolish in his eyes. He struggles between the “dream of innocence and the fact of guilt”. (Gwynn and Blotner 1)Children are represented innocence and pure, while adult symbolizes mature, phony and corrupted. Holden desires the innocence of children, which is revealed in his affection toward his young sister, Phoebe. In Chapter 21, when Holden went back home to see his sister Phoebe, she is sleeping with her face sort of on the side of the pillow. She had her mouth way open. “Its fumy,” Holden commented. But “you take adults, they look lousy when they are asleep and they have their mouths way open, but kids dont. Kids look all right. They can even have spit all over the pillow and they still look all right”. (salinger166) In Holdens opinion children are far better than adults in almost every aspect. Children are unaffected by convention, conformity, and immorality. And children are sincere and innocence and, “what the bell youre talking about”. (Salinger 68) Children are lovely under any condition. Holden is fascinated with the unmediated beauty of childhood. As Robert G. Jacobs has stated, “Childhood is the source of the good in human life; it is in that state that human beings are genuine and open in their love for one another. It is when people become phony and logical and come to love the reasons for love more than the loved person.” (Jacobs 13)Holden truly wishes that people would stay children for their whole lives, and that they would retain their bunt honesty and naivety even as they grow smarter and gain experience.In many aspects, there is great difference between children and adults. Children are pure and naive. They have not yet learned the pretense and phoniness, the common features for the sophisticated adults. In the frightfully corrupted adults world, it is filled with perversion and distortion. The human relationships in the society are increasingly impersonal. They say: “Glad to meet you or Good luck!” or “Grand!” And even the bald men who hopefully comb their hair over the bald spot. In the adult world, Holden can find nothing but indifference and frustration. To Holden, growing up is entering the new world where phony snobs gather there. He is reluctant to make entrance to it, for he cannot find any role in it. He laments the simple and innocent childhood, and doesnt want to cross the line into adulthood. He rejects all rites that mark initiation into adult life. Faced with his impending movement into adulthood, Holden considers various means of escaping from the worlds influences to preserve his adulthood. He makes great effort to hold on, retreating back to the innocent and unchanged childhood. As Holden himself says, “Certain things they should stay the way they are”. (Salinger 128)III. The Rebellion of HoldenThe main body of the story is Holdens rebellion against the phony world. Holden lives in a phony world, he feels indifferent, lonely, and even wants to commit suicide. Holden falls into the frustration of the adult world; he doesnt want to get out of the innocent world. “The honesty and sincerity which he cannot find in others, he attempts to maintain in himself.” (Kegel 55)A. Rebellion Against the Educational SystemHoldens criticism concerning the goals and practices in the schools turns out something against his expectations of education. The following excerpt clearly speaks out this:Its full of phonies, and all you do is study, so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football tram loses, and you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam clicks. The guys that are on the basketball team stick together, the Catholics stick together, the goddam intellectuals stick together, the guys that play bridge stick together. Even the guys that belong to the goddam Book-of-the-Month club stick together. (Salinger 137)In Holdens eyes, Pencey is a place where children are brought up to the bone of the society. Although the adults agree there is a very top score school, but there are full of “crooks”. He cannot find any warmth, guidance and love there, but indifference, pretense and coldness: self-centered classmates like Ackley and Stradlater, and unreasonable teachers like Spenser. In wealthy boarding school, “All you do is talk about girls and sex all day.” (Salinger 137) In Chapter24, Mr. Antolini, the teacher shows great concern about Holdens difficulties with lectures of Oral Expression he failed. In these lectures, if a classmate disagrees during his speech, “Youre supposed to yell Digression! at him as you ran.” (Salinger 190) Mr. Antolini wants him to explain, and yet Holden puts in this way: “The trouble with me is, I like it when something digresses. Its more interesting and all.” (Salinger 190) Apparently, Holden disagrees with the teaching methods.Holden suffocates with all those stuffs taught in Pencey, “Id get the hell out of Pencey. I just didnt want to hang around any more. It made me too sad and lonesome.”(Salinger 54-55) When Dr. Thurmer, the headmaster at Pencey, preaches that life is a rewarding game if played “according to the rules,” (Salinger 12) Holden responds with disgust, “If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then its a gamebut if you get on the other sideNoting. No game.” (Salinger 13) he has no interest in the game and therefore doesnt want to follow the rules by Pencey.In short, Holden escapes from Pencey to New York, which is the expression against pre-school education-“its small minded teachers and even small minded students, its boring classes and conformist atmosphere”. (Sanford 78)B. Rebellion Against the Adult WorldThere are many phony surroundings of Holden, but as a sixteen-year-old adolescent, he has not enough power to rebel against it. He expresses his indirect rebellion with his own strange way.Firstly, the red hunting hat is his different style with other people. It has been mentioned twenty-four times in the novel, which he bough when he was ostracized by his fencing team members, expresses his caution against the outside world of the adult. On one hand, red represents Mars, which associates “War” in ancient Roman mythology. And “war” also means rebellion; on the other hand, his hat has a very long peak. The way Holden wears the hat is also unusual as he says: “I swung the old peak way around to the back very corny.” (Salinger 21) Obviously, Holden knows the way he wears the hat with the peak reversed is obscure and irregular, but he likes it. He doesnt think of it as “People-shooting hat”, in the literal sense, but “he means to take up weapons and have it out of phonies”. (Stanford 40) In other words, it also means that Holden likes to be different from others and to be against the convention. The way Holden wears the hat can be seen as a sign against the social customs and convention.Secondly, if we take a close look at these comments on The Catcher in the Rye, we can find that the language of Holden Caulfield, “Stupid, damn, crazy, hell, goddam, bastards, ass” commonly appears in his language. He lies and confesses, “Im the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life.” (Salinger 20) We notice that Holdens language is a slang, which is one of the things that impress us greatly rebellion of the adult force, as we put it previously, Holden tries hard to find a way out to protect the innocence of the young. The style of Holdens language gives us the impression that, rather than the fact that he is expelled from the school, it is his own choice to leave the school. The language of Holden is typical of teenagers. “His favorite words-for instance, lousy, crumby, old, and stupid-as such that they carry the meaning of the cynicism of a young boy on the corrupted world.” (Costello 178) The selection of his slang typically exemplifies the character of the American teenager. Why does Holden choose to use such a word? It is not hard to find the rebellion motive in his word. Holden thinks himself “read a lot”, but not only aware of the existence of “grammatical errors,” naturally, we see that Holden is a typical enough teenager to violate the rules, even though he knows of their social importance.Thirdly, he fails in searching love and warmth in New York, and feels very frustrated and alone in the adult world. So he wants to escape from the corrupted world and runs to the west to be a deaf-mute. “I decide Id never go home again and Id never go away to another school again.” (Salinger 205) and he contemplates a retreat within himself. He images to go somewhere nobody knows him and he knows nobody. He pretends to be a deaf-mute and takes no trouble to have any “phony” conversation. This is his last silent rebellion of the adult world. For a sixteen-year-old boy, expect escaping, he doesnt do any other things for the strong phony world. “Holden