What I admire most about Holden Caulfield is his spontaneity, his ability to speak his mind, without fear or favour. He is an ‘all-licensed fool’ who condemns the values and institutions of post World War 2 America from the vantage point of his mental hospital window. Yet arguably, his rebellion
is apolitical and is rather a response to his inability to cope with the death
of his brother Allie and his fear of growing up and accepting responsibility
for his actions. This discussion will examine the extent to which Salinger's highly influential novel
is a representation of rebellion and the failure of the American Dream.
The concept of the American Dream was expressed by
James Truslow Adams in 1931 in his book
Epic
of America: ‘The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life
should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each
according to ability and achievement… It is not a dream of motor cars and high
wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman
shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately
capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the
fortuitous circumstances of birth of position.’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream
In other words, according to Adams the American Dream was not
originally about attaining wealth and property but about maximizing an individual's
potentials.
Holden Caulfield is a stunted boy in many ways who experiences many difficulties fitting in.
Although he is from a rich middle class family, he hates material values and his
approaching physical ‘fall’ is symbolic of his spiritual decay. In the context
of the disintegration of Western values following the mass slaughter during
World War 2, including the Holocaust, the dropping of atomic bombs on civilian
populations and the advent of the Cold War, Holden is a teenager trying to make sense of it all.
School
Pencey Prep is the fourth private high school Holden has
been kicked out because of his inadequate effort. He has been given frequent
warnings to apply himself but he usually comes to class unprepared and makes no
effort at all. He admits to his history teacher old Spencer that he had ‘sort
of glanced’ through his textbook ‘a couple of times.’ He is easily bored and
has difficulty concentrating. Pressed by Spencer, Holden concedes that he has
‘not too much’ concern for his future and suggests that ‘I’m just going through
a phase right now.’
Spencer tries to instill in Holden the notion that life is a
game and that ‘you should play it according to the rules.’ He readily agrees
with his teacher, but in his thoughts he is disdainful, dismissive of this idea and sides
with the underdog:
'Game my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the
hot-shots are, then it’s a game, all right- I’ll admit that. But if you get on
the other side, where there aren’t
any hot-shots, then what’s a game about it? Nothing. No game'.
We discover later the underlying reasons why Holden is
struggling at school. His rebellion is not out of mischief or indifference. He
is failing at school because he has not learnt to cope with the death of his
younger brother Allie from leukemia and he has yet to accept that his life is
changing and he will have to accept the responsibilities which come with
adulthood.
Ivy League Bastards
Holden’s father is a corporate lawyer who wants him to
attend ‘Yale, or maybe Princeton’ when he finishes high school. Holden insists
that he ‘wouldn’t go to one of those Ivy League colleges if I was dying.’ He hates their ‘tired, snobby
voices.' He is nauseated by their ‘goddam checkered vests’ and phony
egotistical conversations. He takes considerable delight in telling an anecdote
about ‘this Joe Yale-looking guy’ at Ernie’s jazz club. The guy tries to feel
up his girlfriend under the table while telling her about some guy in his dorm
who tried to kill himself by swallowing a whole bottle of aspirin. If these phonies' lives were the pinnacle of success, why would the 'flit' want to top himself?
Phoniness
Holden seeks authenticity in a phony world. He sees phoniness
everywhere. He is repulsed by phoniness- people who big-note themselves and who
treat ordinary people with contempt. He calls his headmaster Mr Haas ‘the
phoniest bastard I ever met in my life’ because of his duplicity in judging
parents by their appearance. He mocks the local undertaker Mr Ossenburger who
has donated money to Pencey and has had a dorm named after him:
He said he talked
to Jesus all the time. Even when he was driving the car. That killed me. I can
just see the big phony bastard shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to
send him a few more stiffs.
He tells his sister Phoebe that Pencey is ‘full of phonies.’
He ‘damn near puked’ listening to his dorm mate Stradlater putting on a fake
‘Abraham Lincoln, sincere voice’ trying to crack on to Jane in the back seat of
coach Ed Banky’s car. What he dislikes about Ernie the piano player is that
‘when he plays, he sounds like the
kind of guy that won’t talk to you unless you’re a big-shot.’ In the Wicker Bar,
he expresses his disgust at the bartender who ‘didn’t talk to you at all
hardly, unless you were a big-shot or celebrity or something.’
Holden’s basic problem is that he fails to see his own phoniness.
He frequently lives in the fantasy world in his head and constantly lies about
his identity and the events in his life. He is obviously deeply confused and depressed
and often impulsively responds to situations by crying. After he is smacked by
the pimp Maurice, he feels like jumping out the window and imagines
‘rubbernecks’ gawking at his dead body on the ground. Later, after he
accidentally drops and smashes the vinyl record he has bought for Phoebe, he
visualizes ‘millions of jerks’ attending his funeral.
Holden is too traumatized to understand his own hypocrisy.
He is clearly deluded and instead of taking concrete steps to ease his
transition from youth to adulthood, he desires to escape from it all. In an important conversation with Sally Hayes as they stroll
home from the skating rink, Holden tells her they could leave tomorrow for
Massachusetts and Vermont:
We’ll stay in these cabins and stuff like that till the
dough runs out. Then, when the dough runs out, I could get a job somewhere and
we could live somewhere with a brook and all and, later on, we could get
married or something.’
Sally is astonished and knows it won’t work: ‘You can’t just
do something like that…in the first
place, we’re both practically children.’
Holden’s desire to escape the responsibilities of growing up
reach a climax after he visits his ex-teacher Mr Antolini and his family. As he
walks up Fifth Avenue, Holden feels like he is disappearing and he makes believe
that he is talking to his deceased brother Allie to help hold his sanity
together. He pleads with him ‘don’t let me disappear.’ He decides that he needs
to leave. To hitchhike out west:
I figured I could get a job at a filing station somewhere,
putting gas and oil in people’s cars. I didn’t care what kind of job it was,
though. Just so people didn’t know me and I didn’t know anybody. I thought what
I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn’t have
to have any goddamn stupid useless conversations with anybody.
He goes on to explain how he’d build himself a cabin near
the woods and grow and cook his own food, and later perhaps, how he’d meet a
beautiful deaf-mute girl and marry her and how they would communicate through
messages on scraps of paper.
This is fanciful, deluded stuff. His desire to drop out and
escape from the pressures of modern living is ill-founded and more a response
to his confusion and mental fatigue than to a genuine rebellion.
Materialism
Arriving at the Lavender Room, Holden is given a ‘lousy
table way in the back’ and says ‘in New York, boy, money really talks- I’m not
kidding.’ His grandmother provides Holden with most of his pocket money and the
casual way he throws it around creates the impression that he does not
really appreciate the value of it. Although he accepts that everything he had ‘was
bourgeois as hell’ including his posh fountain pen and suitcase, he is naïve in
appreciating how really privileged his life is materially. After donating ten
dollars to the nun’s charity, Holden is annoyed that he running low on cash and
needs to save a few bucks so he can take Sally out to a movie, ‘Goddamn money.
It always ends up making you blue as hell.’ From his upper middle class white
perspective, he clearly has no clue how the poor struggle to survive from week
to week.
In a concerted plea for help Holden strongly expresses to
Sally his disgust for city life:
'I hate living in New York. Taxicabs, and Madison Avenue
buses, with the drivers and all always yelling at you to get out at the rear
door.’ He shifts to a vitriolic rant to people’s obsession with cars:
Take most people, they’re crazy about cars. They worry if
they get a little scratch on them, and they’re always talking about how many
miles they get to the gallon, and if they get a brand-new car already they
start thinking about trading it in for one that’s even newer. I don’t even like
old cars. I mean they don’t even
interest me. I’d rather have a goddam horse.’
Sally is hugely puzzled, she has no idea what Holden is trying
to explain to her, ‘I don’t know what you’re even talking about.’
Holden takes care to sum up his angst to her. His hatred of
boarding school, of early 1950s American values:
'You ought to go to a boy’s school sometime. It’s full of
phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn 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 team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and
sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam
cliques.’
Holden’s anger largely stems from his inability to fit in,
to conform, to get anything significant out of life. He admits he is in ‘lousy
shape’ and his discussion with Sally tweaks his desire to finally escape New
York City. He imagines a life of conformity. It is a life full of amusements
and distractions, but overall, a life with little substance or meaning:
'I’d be working in some office, making a lot of dough, and
riding to work in cabs and Madison Avenue buses, and reading newspapers, and
playing bridge all the time, and going to the movies and seeing a lot of stupid
shorts and coming attractions and newsreels. Newsreels. Christ almighty.
There’s always a dumb horse race, and some dame breaking a bottle over a ship,
and some chimpanzee riding a goddam bicycle with pants on'.
This is as close as Holden’s rebellion gets. He is a
dissatisfied with his life and the phoniness of everybody and everything but
rather than challenge society head-on he seeks to escape from it. His rebellion
is unfocussed and self-destructive. Like thousands of other dysfunctional
teenagers in the shadow of the bomb and the paranoia of the Cold War,
he is lost. Mockingly, he is glad that the atomic bomb was invented because he
can make good use to it:
'I’m sort of glad they’ve got the atomic bomb invented. If
there’s ever another war, I’m going to sit right the hell on top of it, I’ll
volunteer for it, I swear to God I will.’
The Catcher in the
Rye
Holden’s real concern is the need to preserve his innocence
and that of children against the assault of the corrupting influences of
society. While waiting for Sally in a leather couch at her private school he
considers the fate of girls who are about to finish school:
'You figured most of them would probably marry dopey guys.
Guys that always talk about how many miles they get to a gallon in their goddam
cars. Guys that get sore and childish as hell if you beat them at golf, or even
just some stupid game like ping-pong. Guys that are very mean. Guys that never
read books. Guys that are very boring'.
Further to this incident while talking to Phoebe in their
parent’s apartment, Holden expresses a strong desire to be ‘a catcher in the
rye’ after he leaves school:
'I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in
this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around-
nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy
cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over
the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I
have to come out from somewhere and catch
them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know
it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be'.
In an important scene when Holden visits Phoebe at her
school to say goodbye, he sees the word ‘Fuck you’ on a wall and rubs it out to
protect her and other young students from the base profanity. He soon spots
another, this time scratched into the wall by a knife, and in a moment of
epiphany, he realizes his impotence in protecting the young, ‘If you had a
million years to do it in, you couldn’t rub out even half the ‘Fuck you’ signs in the world. It’s impossible.’
The Museum of Natural
History
He hops into a cab
and heads for Biltmore.
Holden is curious about where the ducks in Central Park go
in winter because the uncertainty and wild flux in his own life. In thinking
about the ducks he is symbolically thinking about what direction his own life
will take. He loves the museum because it represents a sense of permanence and
order in contrast to his own world which is spinning totally out of control:
'The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything
always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move…nobody’d be different. The only
thing that would be different would be you'.
He reaches the museum, and significantly, it no longer holds
an appeal to him, ‘I wouldn’t have gone inside for a million bucks.’ He hops
into a cab and heads for Biltmore.
Religion
Holden rejects traditional notions of organized religion and
does not attend Church. Although he considers himself as ‘a sort of atheist,’ he
likes Jesus, but he ‘doesn’t care too much for most of the stuff in the Bible.’
What he admires about Jesus is his life of self sacrifice and devotion for the
poor as exemplified by the nuns he meets at Grand Central Station, ‘What I
liked about those nuns. You could tell, for one thing, that they never went
anywhere swanky for lunch.’ In contrast, he hates the fake pomp of the sermons
delivered by the ‘Holy Joe voices’ of the ministers, ‘I don’t see why the hell
they can’t talk in their natural voice. They sound so phony when they talk.’
Holden also despises the superficial images associated with Christmas. When he
sees a Christmas tree being unloaded from the back of a truck after visiting Mr
Antolini, he feels like laughing and then vomiting. When he hears a bunch of Christians
singing ‘come All Ye Faithful’ and carrying crucifixes for Radio City he quips,
‘Jesus probably would’ve puked if He could see it- all those fancy costumes and
all. He is also sacra-religious in mentioning his brother Allie’s soul is ‘in
heaven and all that crap.’
Conclusion
In the course of the novel Holden Caulfield expresses many
rebellious views in relation to school, materialism, war, religion and the
phoniness of community leaders, but ironically, he wishes for a world which
stays the same. Salinger’s perspective on Cold War American society often hits
home, particularly in terms of the alienation of disenfranchised middle class
youth in the face of atomic destruction. In the end, Mr Antolini advises that Holden’s
‘first move will to apply yourself at school.’ The writing of this novel from
the point of view of the asylum is ‘a record of his troubles’ for others to
learn from.
See also my reviews of
the following biographies on Salinger:
