Holden Caulfield: an In-between Loner 麥田捕手中的二元對立
J. D. Salinger had not only depicted the issues or difficulties teenagers in post-war America had to go through during their own process of self-growth and in the society, with the uses of symbolism and slangs, Salinger had also made Holden Caulfield a real boy with flesh and blood that readers can relate to rather than a persona built up within words and sentences. If Holden is a character inspired by Salinger himself, The Catcher in the Rye is certainly a timeless mirror that reflects reality and in which readers across generations can see parts of themselves as well. Besides, by constructing pairs of binary oppositions, Salinger juxtaposed the awkwardness of Holden’s situation. Holden Caulfield cannot be categorized; he was stuck within pairs of two opposite qualities. He was always in-between, and this is also the reason why he felt ″lonesome as hell.″ (Salinger 160)
Salinger had embedded pairs of binary opposition into the story, and the one of childhood and adulthood is the most obvious. Holden, who was at the age of 16 to 17, was not a child, and yet not an adult. Holden was apparently aware of this, he clearly knew that he was no longer a child; in the meantime, he also knew he fails to grow successfully into adulthood. As in chapter 2, Holden said: ″I was sixteen then, and I'm seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I'm about thirteen . . . yet I still act sometimes like I was only about twelve. Everybody says that, especially my father. It's partly true, too . . . ″ (Salinger 5-6). And then he continued saying: ″ . . . but it isn't all true . . . Sometimes I act a lot older than I am--I really do--but people never notice it″ (Salinger 6). This self-confession perfectly presents the fact that Holden was lingering between childishness and maturity. Moreover, Holden’s fantasy of becoming a ″catcher in the rye,″ as he described to Phoebe: ″Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them″ (Salinger 186) also symbolize his being stuck in the position between childhood (the rye) and adulthood (down the cliff).
The binary opposition of childhood and adulthood correlates with the one of innocence and phoniness since in Holden’s point of view, being an adult equaled losing one’s innocence and becoming a phony. Holden refused and resisted to become the phony he had always despised, while it is inevitable that he would not be innocent or naïve as young kids anymore. Some say that Holden was phony himself, saying that Holden had already referred to himself as ″the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life″ (Salinger 13); however, I figure by telling us he is a liar, Holden was actually being quite honest, and this also emphasizes how complicated and contradicting Holden’s personality is. The struggle between innocence and phoniness had confined Holden in this grey area between maturity and immaturity.
Not only being stuck between, Holden also failed to meet the expectation of either his parents or the society. He was kicked out from high school for the fourth time, he swore a lot, smoked a lot, and drank a lot. It seems to be difficult to say Holden Caulfield is a good student. However, readers could easily find that it would still be inaccurate to say that Holden is ″bad″ since He actually did many nice things in this story. For instance, he helped the little girl in Central Park, the boys in The Museum of Natural History, he borrowed his sweater to the obviously friendless James Castle, and he donated 10 bucks for the nuns’ collection — not when he had lots of dough but when he didn’t. Holden was not as bad as Stradlater or those bullies at school, while he was not good enough to meet the expectations he had been embedded on, this is one of the reasons why he was singled out from his schools or even the whole society.
Holden’s self-alienation is often considered a result of the death of his younger brother. Holden was separated from his beloved brother, Allie, and there is no way for him to reunited with Allie but putting himself to death, which, in my opinion, was something he was too ″yellow″ to do. He failed to move on from the loss of Allie, soaked himself in the sorrow and indignation of Allie’s being taken away, and therefore just muddle through his life perfunctorily. Holden could not die along with Allie and also could not live at the moment; thus, he was of course not with the dead and alienated from the livings; he was trapped between heaven and earth.
Finally, the binary opposition between idealism and madness is also significant in this story. Holden ended up being in a hospital, was Holden mad or was he simply too idealistic? In the story, Holden was often considered mad, crazy by other characters around him. For instance, when asking the taxi driver about the ducks, Holden said the driver ″looked at me like I was a madman″ and when he asked the prostitute to talk for a while, that prostitute had the same reaction, according to Holden’s narration. His obsession with the ducks, his fantasy about the catcher in the rye, and his illusions of being shot or punching people are definitely substantiating mental issues of Holden. However, I believe Holden was not mad, he was just a dreamer who dreamed of a world where everything was the way he liked, where justice was served, and where Allie was still alive. Also, the image of the hospital and the image of the boundless rye also form a strong contrast in reader’s mind. Such an ending of Holden’s narration that Salinger arranged seems to suggest that an idealist, a dreamer like Holden must put their feet back to the ground and face the reality.
This world is too intricate and complicated to be explained or labeled with dichotomy, and no one belongs to an exact category. Unfortunately, Holden seemed to be too rigid to realize this. Holden had tried to become one thing and give up another even though he needed not to do so. He could have been an adult with a childlike and sincere heart; he could have made each of his days count and still pining for Allie every single day. However, his sense of alienation and solitude is definitely universal in this imperfect world. Holden Caulfield was and always will be part of us, or at least part of me, for, in some ways, we are all in-between.
Works Cited:
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. Penguin Books Ltd., 2010.
20 March 2018
written in Taipei