The catcher in the rye

"The Catcher In The Rye"

In the novel The Catcher In The Rye we read about a sixteen year old boy named

Holden Caulfield. The story starts off telling us about how he gets kicked out of a preppy

High School and uses his parents money to move to New York. Throughout the story we see Holden expressing different types of personality: The one he shows the world, which I believe is that he is an intelligent young man that doesn’t try, who he thinks he is, which is a depressed person who is looking for companionship, and who he really is, a sacred kid who who doesn’t know what he wants out of life.

Holden went to Pencey Prep., which is a High School in Agerstown Pennsylvania.

He was thrown out of the school because he was failing almost all his classes except for

English. Holden has the ability to pass his classes and even with good grades but he doesn’t apply himself. This is what Holden shows the world, he is capable of passing and is intelligent but doesn’t try. “They gave me frequent warning to start applying myself-especially around midterms,...but I didn’t do it.” (Salinger 4) Also as Holden talks throughout the story we can tell that he is very intelligent because of the way he describes everything, even though his grammar isn’t so well.

Underneath Holden’s act of being this kid who just doesn’t try I think inside he thinks he is depressed and doesn’t care about anything. He gets kicked out of High School and doesn’t try to go to another one, instead he goes to New York looking for sex and traveling form bar to bar for people to talk to. He winds up talking with people he really doesn’t like because he is just looking for companionship, like the three girls he met in the bar and the taxi cab driver who he talks to about what happens to the fish in the lake when it freezes. He even hires a prostitute to have sex but winds just talking to her about nothing because essentially he wants to a friend. He says to the prostitute “Don’t you feel like talking for a while” (Salinger 95)

In my opinion, Holden is really scared of life. He doesn’t know what he wants out of it and he is afraid that if he tries to get what he wants he will screw it up. For example

Holden asks old Sally to run away with him and settle down in Vermont or Mass.