1. Help us understand Holden Caulfield. (Word Count: 474)
Holden Caulfield expresses a lot of different emotions in his life. Holden is still a teenager; he is learning about sex, smoking, alcohol, and he complains and rambles all the time like a teen. Holden wants to run away from New York and go somewhere completely different, a lot like how teens feel (although he has pretty reasonable reasoning behind this, he doesn’t want his parents to find out how much money he lost this weekend (all of it)). He flunks out of school and doesn’t seem to care way too much. Holden is also a pretty strange guy at times. He flunks out of school, yet still writes a composition for Stradlater, and “horses” around at weird times, a lot of the time in front of people, describing himself having a blast and them staring at him, dumbfounded or telling him to cut it out. When he isn’t horsing around and acting like an innocent twerp, he’s struggling over the decision of staying innocent or moving on and understanding adulthood. He is pretty scared of that thing; So many responsibilities! So much gray hair! So phony!
Holden imagines innocence as a field of rye, and a cliff represents becoming an adult. Holden says that he will be the “Catcher in the Rye”, and catch all the innocent children that would otherwise fall off the cliff, but also stay on the innocent side himself. If that’s what he wants to do, though, he is doing a horrible job at it. He smokes a ton, and Phoebe even points out while he’s with her that he’s a bad influence. But, Holden listens to Phoebe; he almost completely stops his smoking after talking with Phoebe; only smoking when offered a cigarette by his former teacher, Mr. Antolini. Mr. Antolini was one of Holden’s friends also, very much like Phoebe, and shares advice with him. Mr. Antolini tells him that he fears Holden’s death will be for nothing, or for an unworthy cause. Holden doesn’t exactly follow him, because he’s pretty tired, but you can tell he is really putting his mind into his words. But, when Mr. Antolini strokes Holden’s head, Holden immediately shouts out that Antolini had gone too far, and left. His somewhat exaggerated response here is seen throughout a lot of the book, exaggerating about basically every single amount of time or distance he calculates. He doesn’t know/care how long a mile is, he only cares about how long it feels.
Wow that was a lot longer than I thought it was. Well, In short,
Holden is a stereotypical angsty teen that horses around and struggles over the decision of shielding innocence or coming to understand the phony, real world. He has trouble talking to people and these people don’t listen to him anyways, and always create a negative atmosphere around him.
1. Choose a symbol in the text and discuss how it functions in The Catcher. (Word Count: 338)
Inside and outside of the Book, Movies have been one thing that Salinger was not a big fan of.
Heck, in the first paragraph of the book, Holden flat out says “If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies.”
Salinger has been resisting turning the book into a movie, and disliked the Idea of it being a play as well, due to the medium being unable to deliver the 1st person feeling that the book can give you. (The first thing I immediately thought after hearing this argument was “Why not make Catcher in the Rye in VR?”, but this is getting off topic.)
The main reason Holden seems to hate Movies and Actors is because they’re all phonies and snobs. He doesn’t describe it too well, but he says that they’re show-offs, and playing for the crowd. Old Ernie is a good example of this feeling Holden has; he put in crazy high and low notes to amaze the crowd, which Holden remarks would cheer at basically anything. But, again, I’m getting off topic.
Holden, instead of liking Movies, likes doing things just for fun. He “horses around,” gets a bang out of imitating movies (“I hate the movies like poison, but I get a bang imitating them.”), and feels happier after seeing a kid sing "If a body catch a body coming through the rye." At first, I thought he was just being a little creep, but after connecting the dots in class about phonies and becoming older and being exposed to the real world, we realize that Holden likes this song because the boy “was just singing for the hell of it,” and doing it out of pure fun rather than doing it as a job like D.B. in Hollywood.
Holden also complains a lot about Movie audiences. He says that a lot of people laugh at jokes that aren’t funny, and are completely sucked into movies sometimes without caring about the outside world (like their son that needs to use the bathroom).
What is meant by the last two sentences of the novel: "Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody." (Word Count 314)
There are a few sentences before this one that give it a bit more context:
“Anyway, one time… D.B. asked me what I thought about all this stuff I just finished telling you about. I didn't know what the hell to say. If you want to know the truth, I don't know what I think about it. I'm sorry I told so many people about it. About all I know is, I sort of miss everybody I told about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance. I think I even miss that goddam Maurice. It's funny. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
Holden is saying that he misses everyone he told his story to. He even emphasizes that he misses the people he had previously hated. The last two sentences are told directly to the reader, referring to the reader as “you”, and are told as a piece of advice, that if you start to talk with someone and create a relationship with them, you’re going to miss them, or at least miss the people in your life in your past.
But throughout the book, does Holden really follow this advice? Holden had been yearning for people to talk to, looking through his phone book, and almost only has long conversations with people he’s met before or people. The people he missed the most were people like Jane and Allie; people he didn’t talk with during the book. It seems like Holden experiences almost the opposite of what he’s telling the reader to do; He tells you “Don’t ever tell anybody anything,” yet he pretty much talks to anyone that he can to let out all of his feelings and emotions. He’s saying that he missed Stradlater, Ackley, and Maurice, but he doesn’t seem to miss them at all. Who he really misses are Jane and Allie.
‘I had the privilege of meeting your mother and dad when they had their little chat with Dr. Thurmer some weeks ago. They're grand people.’ ‘Yes, they are. They're very nice.’ Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.”
(5 Salinger)
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(Literary Analysis/Question)
What’s wrong with the word grand? Wouldn’t it be used to describe something good? Or would it be a word like ‘peculiar’ or ‘interesting’ which can describe both good and bad things? Why does Holden think the word Grand is phony?
(Clarify)
Ok, I can’t see anything online that implies Grand being more of a negative word than a positive word, but Holden seemes to see it in this negative way. Going through the book, basically every time “Grand” is mentioned, it’s with a “phony.” Here...
“"Yes--who is this?" she said. She was quite a little phony” (Salinger 57)
In response to going to matinees, she said “I’d love to. Grand.” (Salinger 57), and Holden almost decides not to go. This word was so deliberately used, it gets its own entire sentence. I guess it’s just to symbolize who’s “phony” and acting all fancy and using vocabulary like “grand” instead of something like “radical.”
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