Character Analysis: The Catcher In The Rye

It is often said that the people one surrounds themselves with can reflect things about themselves, such as their beliefs and ideals. One’s friends and acquaintances can reveal subconscious attractions to people that fulfill their ideals or agree with the things they say, but these relationships can also help one discover their personal philosophies by reinforcing opposing views. Indeed, in J.D. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye, the way Holden reacts to and interacts with secondary characters reveal his established philosophies and the values he holds most dear to him.

The coming of age phase in a young person’s life is a transitional phase which prompts the idea of individualism, decision making, acceptance, moral challenges, disappointment, and individual needs. These years are essential for the overall learning and growing-up part of someone’s life. Coming of age characteristics transpired in the novel The Catcher in the Rye and The Absolutely True Diary of a part-time Indian pertain to, but do not exclude, the acceptance of the complexities and “grayness” of the world, confrontation with the adult world, and the individual needs and desires vs. external pressures/expectations/norms. In both novels, young boys are faced with tough choices that will later help them in the overall transition from

In Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the main character, Holden, had many opportunities to learn life lessons but every time his faulty thinking caused him to focus on the problem and not the solution. Whenever Holden looks at situations he negatively overgeneralizes them with a bad attitude rather than learning from it.

Holden Caulfield is a character who has been through rejection and wishes to protect others innocence. He is a teen boy who is the main character in Catcher in The Rye by J.D.Salinger. He has an older brother named DB, a younger sister named Phoebe, and a younger, deceased, brother named Allie. Holden retells his story on him, trying to be the catcher in the rye. Holden has been kicked out of different colleges. He has been rejected by different girls. Holden goes through his life story. He talks about being kicked out of Pencey, his friend Jane, his “acquaintance” Stradlater, and how, when, and where Allie died. Society is to blame for Holden Caulfield's decline in mental stability. Society does not help Holden. Instead, they ignore his

In “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D Salinger, Holden Caulfield, a 16-year-old boy who has recently expelled from school, had lost his younger brother to Leukemia and witnessed the suicide of one of his peers, struggles in his journey of coming of age. He isn’t fond of the idea of having to mature and be exposed to responsibilities and problems of the real world. As a result, he tries to preserve the innocence of his younger sister, Phoebe. One way in which he aims to accomplish this goal is through a Little Shirley Beans record which he buys in hopes of giving it to Phoebe. Salinger utilizes the symbol of the broken record to develop Holden’s loss of innocence and deteriorating character.

It is known that humans require interaction between each other. As a result we tend to get attached and depend on them. We tend to advocate others from groups and keep to the same people. J. D. Salinger explores this in his book in 1951, The Catcher in the Rye. This book is beloved by many because it is so easy to connect to, even our generation now can connect to Holden and some of the things he goes through. The story is about a boy named Holden, he gets kicked out of school multiple times, and instead of telling his parents he wanders around New York in search of someone that cares and that he can make a connection with. Growing up is hard, and we need human connection to make through the hard times.

One must inevitably confront the daunting face of adulthood. In J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger depicts the disheartening journey from adolescence to adulthood that Holden Caulfield endures. Although holden seeks the freedoms that mark adulthood, he has yet to take up the role of a truly mature citizen as the society conforming nature of those adults disgust him, leading him to his gradual mental decline. J. D. Salinger uses the immature character of Holden Caulfield as a means of revealing the difficult transition from adolescence to adulthood and its psychological effects.

In J.D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, chapter 25, page 260, Holden discovers text written on the bathroom walls of his younger sister, Phoebe’s elementary school. The text reads “F*ck you”. Holden was very upset in this particular scene in such a way that the reader might ask “why?”. His anger is expressed explicitly with him cursing on the person who wrote this and he vowed that he would love to kill whoever did this if he ever caught them. Although this scene doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, it is one of the most important scenes in the book leading to a much larger significance. In the novel, there are actually two scenes where the words “f*ck you” are expressed. Firstly, on the bathroom walls of Phoebe’s school and once again on the walls of the museum that Holden frequently visits. J.D Salinger allows his readers to emphasize with Holden’s disdain for profanity by showing his emotional turmoil, contempt of phoniness and his overall protectiveness of his sister, Phoebe.

However, at the end of the book, Holden realizes that adulthood is inevitable. As he watched “all the kids [..] trying to grab for the gold ring, [he] was sort of afraid she’d fall off the goddamn horse, but [he] didn’t say anything or do anything” (Salinger 273-74). Holden knows that children need to learn from their mistakes and use the knowledge to help themselves navigate the corrupt adult world. Holden does not interfere with his sister, because he knows that Phoebe needs to enjoy the innocence of childhood while it lasts. In Clinton W. Trowbridge’s The Symbolic Structure of The Catcher in the Rye, he writes that Holden realizes that “innocence and goodness, epitomized in the condition of the child, are not static conditions; just as the child must grow up through adolescence into adulthood, so much innocence and goodness risk this passage from the adult world allows him to be happy.

The transition between childhood to adulthood is often difficult for people. In the novel The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger’s protagonist, Holden, struggles with this transition because he saw this natural growth as the movement from innocence into corruptness. In the book The Catcher in the Rye, Holden was expelled from Pencey after failing most of his classes and decides to travel to New York. Holden calls everything he does not like “phony” and does not agree with change. The Catcher in the Rye discusses the painfulness of transition to the adult world, by analyzing Salinger’s use of symbolism through the museum, Allie, and Holden’s desire to become “the catcher”readers can understand that change is hard, but necessary.

In the story Holden says that people that adjust to everything around them and change who they were during their childhood are phonies. Since everyone has to adjust like this, Holden thinks that everyone is a phony yet he shows hypocrisy in this since he often lies about who he is and he breaks his own beliefs as well. He likes his little sister Phoebe because she is young and smart but she still shows youth and that may be the reason Holden thinks so fondly of her. In a way he must want what his little sister has which is youth, and he also wants to save the children from adulthood. This corresponds with everyone because eventually we all find out what it is like to grow up and the changes we have to face. We may not like it but we all wish we could have the feeling of being young the older we get. And this his how Holden feels in the

The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D Salinger, is a classic novel that recognize as a perfect tale of teenage rebellion. Salinger highlights the impacts of depression in this novel. After the World War II, The Catcher in the Rye became so popular because it was the first book that revealed the true feelings of teenager. Holden Caulfield, the main character in the novel, symbolizes a teenager revolting against a society and struggles to transit into an adult world. Moreover, his personality reveals uncertainty, turmoil, and depression and this is conventional to all the teenagers after the time of World War II. Although many people have questioned whether the novel is still maintaining its original appeal to today’s teenagers as the time progress, the novel actually remains relevant to teenagers today because of its depression, criticism and actions and the suspicions on the benefits to an individual. Even today, teenagers are able to relate Holden’s characteristics due to the pressures from the family, friends and community, and some teenagers even reject the values of their society. All these demeanors are demonstrated through Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye.

"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel"——— Maya Angelou. The way you treat the people around you not only shows the impression you give them, but it also shows the person inside you without knowing it. Holden Caulfield, who is the protagonist of the novel, The Catcher in the Rye, written by J.D. Salinger, is a seventeen years old teenager, who came from a wealthy family, being his father is a lawyer; he has three siblings, Allie and D.B. are his brothers, and Phoebe is his younger sister. Allie, his younger brother, died of Leukemia when he was only eleven years old, while Holden was thirteen years old, and it devastated Holden because not only was he close to

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger is narrated by the main character, a sixteen year-old boy named Holden Caulfield. The story starts out with Holden attending a prep school near New York City called Pencey Academy. Soon we discover that Holden has been “given the axe” because of his apparent apathy about school and his grades. Unfortunately, Pencey is only one in a series of schools that Holden has flunked out of. The plot is all about Holden going out on an adventure by himself and trying to find who he is in a society and world he cannot seem to find any contentment with. Some of the seemingly random this he does on his ‘escape’ include an exciting night in a New York hotel, a date with one of his old flames, a trip to a museum he

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of