Holden Caulfield Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Essay

On July 18, 1946, Holden Caulfield suffered the loss of his younger brother, Allie, beginning his life of despair and grief. It is often understood that grief consists of seven emotional stages: shock, denial, bargaining, guilt, anger, depression, and acceptance. In The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger's utilizes death as a motif so as to show how the grieving process affects an individual throughout all aspects of his or her life. The stages of coping are represented during the course of the book, appearing whenever death is mentioned. As Holden’s journey starts with shock and denial, it comes to a close with acceptance of what he has gone through.

     Throughout life, an individual may endure emotionally and physically straining moments causing the person to become downhearted, and or irate. These feelings are normal, but may however become a problem when these feelings prohibit someone from living a ‘normal’ life. An estimated 5.2 million American adults ages 18 to 54, or approximately 3.6 percent of people in this age group in a given year, have PTSD (Narrow, Rae, Regier). This purpose of this report is to prove whether or not Holden Caulfield, the main character of J.D. Salingers’s book The Catcher In The Rye, is depressed.

J. D. Salinger, in his novel, “Catcher in the Rye,” reveals how Holden’s life and relationships are affected by the death of his brother. Holden’s brother, Allie, died on July 18, 1946 from leukemia. Before Allie died, the relationship between two were inseparable. Being the younger brother, Allie wanted to be like Holden. Holden often reminiscences times when Allie wanted to spend time with him. “I remember once, the summer I was around twelve, teeing off and all, and having a hunch that if I turned around all of a sudden, I’d see Allie. So I did, and sure enough, he was sitting on his bike outside the fence.” (explain).

When a person hears the phrase, post traumatic stress disorder, most of the time they imagine soldiers returning from war to their families. However, people are not always aware that this disorder occurs in seemingly normal people. In the novel, Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield seems to deal with this disorder. Looking at the surface of the novel, this is unclear. Therefore, this is an inferred trait in the novel. The reader must figure out for themselves that the protagonist retains the disorder. Holden Caulfield suffers from post traumatic stress disorder as he fits the description of symptoms and causes for his issues. Before pursuing Holden’s condition it is important to understand that the disorder can be extremely serious in some and less dramatic in others. This is determined by the cause of the disorder and how the person copes with it. There are several symptoms that clearly display this disorder and once again, it depends on the cause.

Losing someone that is very close to you can cause many problems down the road that people do not realize. In the book The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger, Holden lost his brother Allie, he lost his best friend. This caused Holden to become very depressed and effects his life without his brother. When Holden’s brother died, this was the start of Holden’s falling out. Allie’s death is the cause for him feeling angry at the world, him not being able to stay at a school and causes him to feel alienated from society.

Holden has shown many signs of having post traumatic stress. Some of the signs Holden had was as stated “triggers that can bring back memories of the trauma accompanied by intense emotional and physical reactions.” Holden always bring up Allie his brother, even when he wrote compositions for Stradlater, “So what I did, I wrote about my brother Allie’s baseball mitt,”(Salinger,38) Holden always tends to bring up the past. This is one of the many signs that Holden shows as the book progress. In the text, “All of a sudden, on my way out to the lobby, I got old Jane Gallagher on the brain again,” (Salinger, 76). Holden continuously brings up many people that has made him feel this way about people. Holden also demonstrates a lack of control when it comes to talking to people. When Holden brother Allie died when Holden was just 13, he punched out all the windows out of the garage saying, “It was just for the hell of it,” (Salinger, 39). This indicates that Holden is not a healthy psychologically adolescent, as he can’t articulate the thoughts of his actions. Holden’s lack of control and ability not to let go of the past shows how Holden is not mentally

(Facts about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). "What I did, I started talking, sort of out loud to Allie. I do that sometimes when I get very depressed. I keep telling him to go home and to get his bike and meet me…" (98). Holden does not want to accept the fact that his brother Allie is dead and that he cannot physically be with him any more, so in his mind he replays the times that he and Allie had together. Holden always finds a way to relate a present situation back to Allie.

Trauma is the emotional response of a person to a disturbing or shocking event. The trauma affects people in different ways such as in denial, anger, or depression. In the novel Catcher in the Rye, the main character Holden Caulfield goes through the traumatic event of his younger brother dying of leukemia. As a result, we see him distancing himself from the people he loves. Holden, like many others, goes through life without realizing how much his trauma affects him.

Promptly after Allie's death, Holden struggles to process what has happened. Allie had leukemia, meaning that his parents and Holden likely knew that he was going to pass long before his death. However, when Allie dies, Holden still cannot fathom the thought that his little brother has passed. Feeling lost and helpless, he retreats to violence to express his feelings. His parents recommended a psychoanalyst evaluate Holden after he, “Tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was broken so I couldn't do it” (49). Clearly, Holden cannot confront or endure the pain that Allie's death inflicted on him besides resorting to destroying windows and taking his anger out on God for taking away his beloved brother. Holden did this because his emotional pain severely impacted his well-being, and he wanted to express his pain in a physical manner. Breaking the windows indicates how strong this emotional pain resonated in Holden. However, the long-term effects of Allie's death still resonate with him many years later. From what Holden tells the reader, Allie played a significant role in his life. In fact, he still talks to

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a chronic mental health condition that is triggered by a terrifying event- either experiencing it or witnessing it (Post-traumatic stress disorder). In Holden Caulfield, the terrifying event was Allie’s death. Holden had to watch Allie suffer through his leukemia, and then deal with the emotional pain after Allie was gone. “PTSD occurs in all age groups, Although, the lifetime risk for developing PTSD in U.S. adults is 3.5 percent. Increased rates of PTSD are notable in those who have jobs that place them at risk for being part of a traumatic event, such as police officers, nurses, and firefighters.

In The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Holden is in a rest home, where he speaks about his past and discusses his thoughts and feelings of his memories. Holden tells about his life including his past experiences at many different private schools, most recently Pensey Prep, his friends, and his late brother Allie which led to Holden’s own mental destruction.

Holden told me to how he reacted after the death, “I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddamn windows with my fist, just for the hell of it.” (pg. 21 pdf) He was 13 when this death occurred and he mentioned that his parents were going to get him psychoanalyzed because of what he did. After breaking all the windows in the garage, he tried to break the windows on the station wagon with his already broken hand. This shows how sad and down he got about his brother Allie dying. Everything in life was going well for Holden, family wise, and then a death happened to someone who Holden enjoyed a lot. Another girl Holden talked about in our session is Sally Hayes. The night before Holden makes a date with Sally, he has a prostitute named Sally come to his room. He just left Pencey, so to me, this is his way of letting out some sadness and anger. Holden says he didn’t do anything with her because he wasn’t in the mood anymore. This shows that some depression is coming into his activity level. Holden told me about what him and Sally did on their date. They first went to a show called The Lunts. During the show, Holden said Sally saw a boy she knew named George and he went to Andover. “I sort of hated ofl Sally by the time we got in the cab, after listening to that phony Andover Bastard for about ten hours.” (pg. 69 pdf) Holden told me. He went on to say that they went ice skating at Radio City. After ice skating, Holden explains how he wanted to run away with Sally. She kept saying no because they were still children. He told me that he told her “You give me a royal pain in the ass, if you want to know the truth.” (pg. 72 pdf) At this point, both of them hated each other. Holden said he apologized over and over to her but he ended up just leaving her at the rink. This shows how he can’t keep their relationship in a good place and his mood changed out

During Catcher, the whole story is set as a first person recount from the view of Holden Caulfield, however during this recount, there are certain minor instances of Holden thinking of his life as a child. The recount is from Holden’s point of view as he is obtaining psychiatric help for his mental issues. The majority of these minor flashback moments during the text are directed towards Holden’s younger brother Allie, who passed away with Leukemia when Holden was a few years younger. Holden holds strong memories of his younger brother’s life, and during this extended flashback, he discusses his brother, and although Allie is not part of the story, the audience learns plenty about him. Holden is traumatised by the death of his younger brother, and this traumatic event has helped in making Caulfield the socially awkward person that he is during the book.

To commence, in the novel, it becomes clear that Holden Caulfield suffers from mental illnesses that impede his ability to apply himself in his education and take care of himself properly. Essentially, the center of these problems is the death of his brother, Allie. For example, Holden describes the night Allie died and how he reacted. He states that, “ [he] slept in the garage the night he died,” and “ broke all the [windows in the garage] with [his] fist” (39). Furthermore, as Holden leaves Pencey Prep to a hotel, he spends time alone with his thoughts. In this hotel, Holden replays memories he

He manages to take any idea and see the bad side of it, which is another symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. Also, hopelessness about the future is a symptom. Holden is scared of change because there is no guarantee that the outcome will be positive. He learned this through the experience of Allie’s death. Self-destructive behavior is another symptom and Holden displays this through drinking and smoking.