Catcher In The Rye Literary Analysis

The growth of a child from childhood into adulthood has many unforeseen and unknown consequences that can often cause developmental issues caused by a traumatic childhood experience. The protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye experiences many of these hardships through firsthand experience due to his traumatic childhood, primarily, the death of his brother Allie. J.D Salinger seemed to understand the loneliness that can be brought about by childhood; that loneliness can often lead to negative impacts throughout the entire life of the child including isolation and depression. Other writers such as Laurence Steinberg have written explanations to the problems that can arise from adolescence. J.D Salinger uses characterization and narrative perspective

Holden is often characterized as being hot headed throughout the book including one important quote where Holden is describing a flashback from when his brother died. “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. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn't do it.”(Salinger 39) The moment shown depicts the rage that flowed through Holden about his brother’s death, and the death of his brother would impact his life for years to come. Allie’s death pushed Holden’s life towards the life fueled by negativity and pessimism that is shown throughout the rest of the book. Allie’s death could have impacted Holden also by pushing him towards many sociopathic tendencies, because there are numerous sociopathic traits that Holden displays throughout the book such as the aforementioned superiority complex and anger issues. Holden also is a superficial charmer, often lying about things like his age and even his entire identity, so that he can influence someone to think a certain way, or to do something for Holden, and this showcases another sociopathic trait of Holden’s, his insincerity. A few more sociopathic traits that Holden displays are his unreliability, poor judgement, and more. One thing that reinforces the idea that Allie’s death caused some of the problems that Holden faces is the idea of brain plasticity which is described as “a period of heightened “plasticity” during which the brain is highly influenced by experience.”(Steinberg) This increased influence based upon experience would also not affect Holden’s siblings as much, because D.B was older, so his brain had les “plasticity” to it then Holden’s, and Phoebe would not have been as impacted as