First, in the essay, “In Memoriam: Allie Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye” (1982), that was written by Edwin Haviland Miller. The author disputes why we should read the book. The night after Allie's death Holden slept in the garage and broke "all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it.” As you can tell Holden is distraught of the fact that Allie died. Unfortunately, he went a little overboard with his anger had to be hospitalized because of his actions. He loved his brother so much and had so much pain during his death. Allie had died from leukemia. (par.4) “On several occasions, Holden comments that his mother has never gotten over Allie's death, which may or may not be an accurate appraisal of Mrs. Caulfield since the first-person narrative makes it difficult to judge.” According to this quote, Holden’s mother has been through so much. She never got over it because that is her son and it takes time. (par.3) He decides to call up Jane Gallagher, but by "mistake"--it is almost a comedy of errors--he dials Sally Hayes and makes up for his insults. Holden had tried to call Jane, but on purpose and decided to act like …show more content…
As he gives passages from the novel, he strings the ties together in which we are better ready to see that Holden has made complications throughout his life generally to prevent himself from moving on from his dead brother, another topic I still couldn't seem to reveal. Where I do see myself agreeing with Miller, just to spotlight a more significant point, is that Holden's idea of tension came from the minute Allie passed, spiraling our hero
To begin with, you must first take in to consideration Holden’s feelings towards his little brother Allie. Holden consider Allie “the smartest person in their family”. “..it wasn’t just that he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest …. God, he was a nice kid, though” (5.7).This means that Holden looked
When Allie was alive, his company comforts Holden because of how friendly and happy he was around him. When he dies, Holden does not know how to react, and could not hurt a particular person, so he hurt himself: ”I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it” (39). Because he was so hurt by the death of his brother, Holden releases his frustration physically rather than verbally. Also, he talks to Allie in order to feel less depressive after the prostitute, Sunny, leaves. Holden has not yet found a resolution to comfort him because he is so familiar with telling Allie how he feels.
I would like to discuss how Holden’s misinterpretation of the Robert Burns poem, “Coming Through the Rye”, sums up his deepest desires by taking a journey through his troubled adolescence and his journey to self–discovery that results in his breakdown. According to Phoebe, the original line in the poem is “if a body meet a body”. However, Holden’s misinterpretation of “if a body catch a body” removes all sexual connotations from the original poem. Holden is a deeply disturbed adolescent in search of a way to preserve his childhood innocence. His “red hunting cap” is a symbol of his uniqueness and his rejection to conform to society.
One of the most impactful events in Holden’s past is the death of his brother. Jos death definitely took a big piece of Holden’s innocence. One of the main causes of his depression is the death of Allie’s and it had a tremendous impact on his life. Allie inset rarely mentioned, his passing had a great impact on Holden. Leukemia took is younger brothers innocents and this deeply saddened him and he promise himself to that he would do whatever he could not to let that happen to other innocent kids. “I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I’ll admit, but I hardly didn’t even know I was doing it, and you didn’t know Allie”
Holden’s apparent desire to be separated from the majority of his family and friends appears to have been triggered by the death of his younger brother Allie. From Allie’s there has been a downward spiral in Holden’s relationships, as he begins to avoid contact with others and isolate himself more. The reason I believe this is because we can see how immense his anger is after Allie’s death, ‘I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist’. The death of Allie has become like an awakening to Holden, and has alerted him how precious childhood innocence is, when Holden comes to this realisation he convinces himself to do everything within his power to protect the innocence of himself and those around him, to protect them from what he sees as a false adult world. Although Holden clearly fails to protect himself, as he falls into all sorts of situations which hardly boasts of innocence and virt... ...
The overwhelming pain that Holden had suffered during the past was nonetheless an impact, which stained his future life. Some evidence that implies Holden’s characteristic is how he grudgingly criticizes and scorns at almost everyone he knows. After he leaves Pencey Prep School, he falls into a dilemma where he faces loneliness and depression. More so, he desperately seeks company from clubs, bars, and hotels to have someone to accompany him. The factors that affect this isolation of him are mostly because of the tragic death of his younger brother Allie and the life he has in school. He was an important person to Holden. He mentions how great and smart Allie was out of the entire family. When Stradlater told Holden to write an essay for him Holden decided that he wanted to write a paper about Allies baseball mitt, which had poems written on it and Holden still carries with him the mitt at school (38). The life he has in school is very miserable to him because he has already failed two other schools and it is happening to him again. He says that he did not mean to disappoint and hurt his parents’ feelings so he takes a few days out to Edmont Hotel (59).
...her. Other than his sister, Phoebe, Allie was the only person that really connected with Holden. Holden feels as though he has no one anymore, and he can never find joy in activities he now does by himself. His anxiety and depression go hand-in-hand and share many of the same symptoms. Holden is not a normal teenager who experiences stress and depression from tests and friendships, but a teenager who needs help coping with the stress and depression from the death of a loved one.
Immediately after Allie’s death, Holden changes immensely. His very first act after Allie died was smashing all his garage windows with his fist. Following this aggressive act, he becomes a recluse and judges every person he crosses to- I assume- Allie, because of how much he still reminded Holden of innocence, and will for the rest of his life. Cynthia Barron states, “Holden is sixteen… in a unique position, caught in the limbo between childhood and adulthood. Thus faced with their inability to adapt to an adult world that is hypocritical and corrupt, both boys seek a return to the realm of childhood” (Barron). In my personal opinion, i believe that he ...
Salinger describes Holden as someone who wishes and desires to have an intimate relationship with Sally, but based on Freudian theory, Holden’s slip of the tongue reveals that he is bothered by Sally and her counter-argument to his proposal of moving together out of New York. Another defense mechanism that is manifested by Holden is denial. In “The Psychodynamic Perspective,” Robert F. Bornstein from Noba informs readers that denial is the failure to recognize negative effects of an event or experience. While Holden fails to succumb to the realization that he must release himself from the negative effects of Allie's death, he also struggles to submit to another necessity: growing up. Salinger includes a conversation between Holden and his sister Phoebe on page 173, where Holden reveals to Phoebe that he would want to be a catcher in the rye, where he would stop children playing on a cliff in a field of rye from falling. In other words, the protagonist desires to prevent kids from maturing and losing their innocence. Holden deflects his
Allie, Holden’s young brother who died several years earlier, was a key symbol throughout the story. When Holden remembers incidents from his past involving Allie, his attitude changes, such as when he writes the composition about Allie’s baseball glove or when Holden broke his hand after punching all of the windows after Allie died. He feels that Allie was one of the few people who were not phony in a world full of phonies. More importantly, Allie represents the innocence and childhood that Holden strives to find throughout his multi-day journey. In Holden’s opinion, Allie represents the purity that Holden looks for in the world. Holden admits that he admires Allie more than he admires Jesus, and even prays to Allie at one point, rather than Jesus. Allie is Holden’s role model, whom he judges the rest of the world according to. When Allie dies, it creates turbulence in Holden’s life.
Holden feels as if he is stuck in his 13 year old self. Although he is aging he isn’t necessarily maturing the way his classmates and other people are around him. This is due to the fact that he never received closure when Allie died. When he starts picturing his own funeral because he might get pneumonia and die, he remembers D.B. telling him about his brother's funeral. He stated, “I wasn’t there. I was still in the hospital. I had to go to the hospital and all after I hurt my hand” (Salinger 171). Since he never attended the funeral he never got to say his final goodbyes to the one person he truly loved. Holden feels as if he can’t connect with anyone else in the world like he did with Allie. If he did then he would most likely push them away, so he wouldn’t have to experience the trauma of loss again, because it greatly impacted his life the first time. The trauma Holden experienced when he was younger resulted in him not being able to form stronger relationships with people which made him more depressed and
Allie's death was tragic but maybe it is the death that Holden wanted for himself , he wanted to preserve his innocence. One example of Allie's innocence is " He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at anybody" Holden valued the mitt he only showed it to one person outside his family, Jane , "She was the only one, outside my family, that I ever showed Allie's baseball mitt to, with all the poems written on it. She'd never met Allie or...
The origins of Holden’s disillusionment and the reason that it all started is the death of his younger brother which he was very fond of and admired, Allie, three years ago. The death of Allie is very significant in Holden’s mind since it is an event which he remembers quite clearly at multiple occasions during the book. For example, when Holden is writing a descriptive composition for his roommate Stradlater, he decides to write about Allie’s baseball mitt since it is the only thing on his mind. “My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder’s mitt. He was
S.N. Behrman, in his review for The New Yorker, also took a sharp look at Holden's personality. Behrman found Caulfield to be very self-critical, as he often refers to himself as a terrible liar, a madman, and a moron. Holden is driven crazy by phoniness, an idea under which he lumps insincerity, snobbery, injustice, callousness, and a lot more. He is a prodigious worrier, and someone who is moved to pity quite often. Behrman wrote: "Grown men sometimes find the emblazoned obscenities of life too much 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 curious and compassionate, a true moral idealist whose attitude comes from an intense hatred of hypocrisy. The novel opens in a doctor's office, where Holden is recuperating from physical illness and a mental breakdown. In Holden's fight with Stradlater, his roommate, he reveals his moral ideals: he fears his roommate's sexual motives, and he values children for their sincerity and innocence, seeking to protect them from the phony adult society. Jane Gallagher and Allie, the younger brother of Holden who died at age 11, represent his everlasting symbols of goodness (Davis 317).
There are several instances within J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye in which Holden expresses his misapprehension of death. In Chapter 5, on page 38 Holden provides a long excursus on Allie, specifying the particulars of his life and death. The consequential point comes at the close of the digression when Holden discloses his own reaction to Allie’s death. In this Chapter Holden first poses the question of why did Allie have to die at such a young age.