The number of readers who have been able to identify with Holden and make him their hero is truly staggering.
Something about his discontent, and his vivid way of expressing it, makes him resonate powerfully with readers who come from backgrounds completely different from his. It is tempting to inhabit his point of view and revel in his cantankerousness rather than try to deduce what is wrong with him. The obvious signs that Holden is a troubled and unreliable narrator are manifold: he fails out of four schools; he manifests complete apathy toward his future; he is hospitalized, and visited by a psychoanalyst, for an unspecified complaint; and he is unable to connect with other people.
We know of two traumas in his past that clearly have something to do with his emotional state: the death of his brother Allie and the suicide of one of his schoolmates. In almost every case, he rejects more complex judgments in favor of simple categorical ones. Holden is a virgin, but he is very interested in sex, and, in fact, he spends much of the novel trying to lose his virginity.
He seems and this is why his character can be so addictive to have something that few people ever consistently attain: an attitude toward life. One goal of education is to teach people to want the rewards life has to offer, but another goal is to teach them a modest degree of contempt for those rewards, too. That it might end up on the syllabus for ninth-grade English was probably close to the last thing Salinger had in mind when he wrote the book.
So, presumably, is Hamlet. But his sense that everything is worthless is just the normal feeling people have when someone they love dies. Life starts to seem a pathetically transparent attempt to trick them into forgetting about death; they lose their taste for it. What drew Salinger to this plot? The story was bought by The New Yorker but not published until And there are characters named Holden Caulfield in other stories that Salinger produced in the mid-forties.
Salinger spent most of the war with the 4th Infantry Division, where he was in a counter-intelligence unit. The 4th Division suffered terrible casualties in those engagements, and Salinger, by his own account, in letters he wrote at the time, was traumatized. He fought for eleven months during the advance on Berlin, and by the summer of , after the German surrender, he seems to have had a nervous breakdown. He checked himself into an Army hospital in Nuremberg.
Seymour is a war casualty. It is as a hero of that culture that Holden Caulfield has survived. And it is not a celebration of youth. It is a book about loss and a world gone wrong. By the mid-nineteen-fifties, Salinger had disappeared down his New Hampshire rabbit hole.
They are not thrown into a state of higher intensity by trauma or by grief. They are just in a state of higher intensity. There is no suggestion of pregnancy. After , Salinger stopped writing stories, in the conventional sense. He seemed to lose interest in fiction as an art form—perhaps he thought there was something manipulative or inauthentic about literary device and authorial control.
His presence began to dissolve into the world of his creation. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results. Subjects: US English. Like Mr. Antolini, Phoebe seems to recognize that Holden is his own worst enemy. Allie dies of leukemia three years before the start of the novel. Allie was a brilliant, friendly, red-headed boy—according to Holden, he was the smartest of the Caulfields.
A very attractive girl whom Holden has known and dated for a long time. She is certainly more conventional than Holden in her tastes and manners. Read an in-depth analysis of Mr. Luce is three years older than Holden and has a great deal of sexual experience. At Whooton, he was a source of knowledge about sex for the younger boys, and Holden tries to get him to talk about sex at their meeting.
Read an in-depth analysis of Carl Luce Mr. Antolini now teaches at New York University. He is young, clever, sympathetic, and likable, and Holden respects him. Holden sometimes finds him a bit too clever, but he looks to him for guidance.
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