& # 8211 ; Catcher In The Rye Essay, Research Paper
Life s Many Obstacles
In J. D. Salinger s The Catcher in the Rye the supporter, Holden, is faced with many obstructions. Like most tragic heroes, he is a adult male who is moderately happy at the beginning of the calamity, but as the calamity develops, some failure in his personality begins to impact events, so that his advancement is a motion from felicity to wretchedness. The ultimate wretchedness consequences from his concluding consciousness of his personalities bounds or failures. Much of Holden s wretchedness is a consequence of his inability to successfully manage peculiar jobs sing adolescence.
Holden s solitariness and overall low self-pride are the primary stripling motivaters for his dislocation. Holden s general demand for female company leads him to a moderately accurate soul-searching: he thinks that he is the biggest sex lunatic you of all time saw, but subsequently admits that he truly doesn T understand sex or cognize much about it. Holden, nevertheless, finds himself experiencing instead horny and decides to name upon the service of Faith Cavendish. She wasn t precisely a prostitute or anything but she didn t head making it one time in a piece & # 8230 ; Holden feels this experience will thrust him into what he considers the grownup universe. The conversation with Faith was a long one but necessarily led to nil. An incursion into the grownup universe, or what Holden considers it to be, had been thwarted. In portion, the failure happens because he doesn t truly know the regulations, and besides because solitariness is non a replacement for experience.
Accustomed prevarication is a trait non merely found in adolescence but besides in people of all ages. It is sometimes generated from a deficiency of self-pride, ennui and self-preservation. Holden exaggerates many truths non out of a witting determination to lead on, but instead to impart accent to facts he is diffident of as when he states, Pencey Prep advertises in about a 1000 magazines. However, Holden besides has no strong beliefs against stating straight-out falsehoods if he can come out for the better on the other side of the exchange. I m the most terrific prevaricator you of all time saw in your life. It s atrocious. If I m on my manner to the shop to purchase a magazine, even, and person asks me where I m traveling, I m apt to state I m traveling to the opera. It s awful. So when I told old Spencer I had to travel to the gym to acquire my equipment and material, that was a sheer prevarication. I don t even maintain my blasted equipment in the gym. Of class, it is ever of import to maintain in head that if Holden is a prevaricator, as he cla
ims, so it is possible that many of his admittances are untrue, but if he is non truly a prevaricator, so the statement that he is a prevaricator can non be true. This Catch-22 reveals a glance of the confusion Holden feels about the universe, and is important because it is confusion that eventually puts him in the infirmary.
The humdrum of Holden s modus operandis, the sensed ennui of his life, and the pettiness of general conversation and actions all add weight to his already considerable adolescent angst. Holden repeatedly uses the word hypocrite to depict both the universe and people around himself. He does so because he does non understand how the mean individual can populate by a codification of professed morality and so really move out wholly different behaviour. During a conversation, Holden learns that Stradlater s day of the month is Jane Gallagher, a miss whom he knows and likes. In the class of this conversation, Stradlater persuades Holden to compose his prep subject for him. While Holden is upset at his brother, D.B. , because the latter prostituted himself to Hollywood, he himself easy gives in to making Stradlater s theme paper. The conversation illustrates the province of general ennui and confusion that Holden lives in daily. Although Holden would hold his audience believe that ennui is built-in in the boarding school state of affairs, he besides confesses that many male childs find ways to get away it through athleticss, faculty members, and sexual relationships.
Catcher in the Rye s character Holden is non your mean adolescent. He is nevertheless a just representation of many ugly adolescent properties. Holden has a certain emotional and mental clumsiness due to the fact that he does non cognize what his maturity has in shop for him. This clumsiness, in bend, manifests itself through Holden s about self-imposed solitariness, accustomed prevarication and hyperbole to cover up his uncertainnesss, and his ennui with the hypocrites and redundancies of life. Although hero may non be the right word picture for Holden, his four twenty-four hours journey is surely tragic and hence slightly comparable to two other immature lost teenagers-Romeo and Juliet. All three characters were largely blind to the forces of nature and society working around them and against them, yet Holden came out on top because he did non yield to the enticement to merely hang up the line and commit self-destruction. After all he does non desire a clump of stupid sightseers looking at me when [ he ] was gory, and to a adolescent visual aspect and repute are every bit of import as anything else.
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