Holden Caulfield Character Analysis Essay

J.D. Salinger has famously said that he is his most famous character, Holden Caulfield. With this statement, Salinger also claimed that while he is Holden, he is also Holden before Salinger went to war. Even though Salinger is the author, his own characters and stories portray him as they clearly depict a character who is molded and shaped by Salinger’s experiences in the war. Through his work in The Catcher in the Rye, we can see Salinger’s battle fatigue or post-traumatic stress disorder in his character, Holden Caulfield. With his other work, we can see what Holden can become or what Salinger has already experienced in the character of Sargent X in “For Esme- With Love and Squalor”. Salinger was deployed during the time of World War II.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), there are a few criteria in order to be diagnosed with PTSD. The first criterion is that a stressor is required which can be onset by a person’s death, witnessing trauma, etc. Holden definitely fits that criteria as he is constantly haunted by his brother’s, Allie’s, death. Next are intrusion symptoms in which the traumatic experience is persistently re-experienced in ways such as emotional distress after exposure to traumatic reminders, unwanted upsetting memories, and physical reactivity after exposure to traumatic reminders. These are true for Holden as he sleeps in the garage and breaks all the windows with his bare hands the night Allie dies. Because of Allie’s death, Holden has a disconnect with the world that makes him emotionally cut off from his peers and adults around him. On the topic of cutting himself off from other people, that signifies another marker for PTSD as Holden definitely has overly negative thoughts and assumptions about the world and has a decreased interest in activities, which is shown by him getting kicked out of school and Holden seemingly not caring at all. Lastly, Holden engages himself in risky or destructive behavior constantly in the novel. He gets into fights regularly and tries his best

Holden misses one mark of the DSM-5. One required criterion for PTSD is avoidance in which the person would avoid any and all things trauma related to the incident. The manual states, “stimuli associated with the trauma are persistently (e.g., always or almost always) avoided” (American Psychiatric Association 275), but Holden basically rejects all of this as his trauma is his main driving force and he thinks back on it regularly. For example, when Stradlater wanted Holden to write his composition for him, Holden wrote about Allie’s baseball and even thought back onto the moments where Allie died. He carries around that trauma and instead of hiding from it, he parades it around and lives by it. He wants to “catch everyone if they start to go over the cliff” and to “be the catcher in the rye and all” (Salinger 191). This would seem to be enough to disprove the whole Salinger hides his disorder within his characters theory. Even though Holden has not been in the war, his environment and settings are similar to Salinger’s and he experiences similar trauma to him as well. Even though Holden does not have the component of avoidance, Salinger manifests this aspect of PTSD in another story. but Salinger does have another story in which he portrays a character with battle fatigue, but this time it is not