Catcher in the Rye Essay: Holden Caulfield - A Nice Kid in a Cruel World :: Catcher Rye Essays

Holden Caulfield - A Nice Kid in a heavy-handed World Over the years, members of the literary community have critiqued just close every author they could get their pen on. One of the most favourite novels to be critiqued has been J. D. Salingers The Catcher in the Rye. In favorable critiques, Holden Caulfield is a proficient guy stuck in a bad world. He is trying to reserve the best of his life, though ultimately losing that battle. Whereas he aims at stability and truth, the crowing world cannot survive without suspense and lies. It is a testament to his innocence and enough spirit that Holden would place the safety of children as a goal in his lifetime. This serves to only re-iterate the fact that Holden is a sympathetic character, a person of postgraduate moral values who is too weak to pick himself up from a difficult situation. S.N. Behrman, in his review for The New Yorker, also took a shrewdly look at Holdens personality. Behrman found Caulfield to be very self-cri tical, as he often refers to himself as a terrible liar, a madman, and a moron. Holden is drive crazy by phoniness, an idea under which he lumps insincerity, snobbery, injustice, callousness, and a hooking more. He is a prodigious worrier, and someone who is moved to pity kind of often. Behrman wrote Grown men sometimes find the emblazoned obscenities of life too more for them, and leave this world indecorously, so the fact that a 16-year old boy is overwhelmed should not be surprising (71). Holden is also labeled as searching and compassionate, a true moral idealist whose attitude comes from an intense shame of hypocrisy. The novel opens in a doctors office, where Holden is recuperating from physical illness and a moral breakdown. In Holdens fight with Stradlater, his roommate, he reveals his moral ideals he fears his roommates sexual motives, and he values children for their sincerity and innocence, seeking to protect them from the phony adult society. Jane Gallagher and A llie, the junior brother of Holden who died at age 11, represent his everlasting symbols of goodness (Davis 317). A quote by Charles Kegel seems to adequately sum up the problems of Holden Caulfield Like Stephen Dedalus of pack Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,Caulfield is in search of the Word. His problem is one of communication as a teenager, he simply cannot get through to the adult world which surrounds him as a sensitive teenager, he cannot get through others of his own age (54).