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The Catcher in the Rye The Catcher in the Rye is a psychological novel based on how events affect the character s mind. Holden Caulfield is an emotionally disturbed sixteen-year old boy who has trouble fitting in and finding a place for himself in society. He sees the world in a different view and dislikes people. Holden s flaw is he is unrealistic to himself and the world. It leads to the inevitability of his doom which is a total mental breakdown.
Holden Caulfield is a prep school student who failed out of Peace Prep around Christmas. Several days before he is expected home, he leaves school planning to spend some time on his own in New York City. Though Holden is friendly with many people, he is constantly lonely and in need of someone who will sympathize with his feelings of alienation. He spends his time with a variety of people, but cannot make meaningful relationships with any of them. Holden decided the only solution to his overwhelming problem is to run away and establish a new identity as a deaf-mute who will not need to communicate with anyone. On the verge of nervous collapse, Holden changes his mind and decides to rejoin his family.
He then enters a rest home, and he tells a psychoanalyst his story. Holden is not sure whether he will be able to handle things better when he leaves the institution, and he is sorry that he told his story at all. Holden Caulfield s flaw is he is unrealistic to himself and the world. When Phoebe asked him what he wanted to be, he said he wants to be a catcher in the rye.
Holden would be in a big rye field and he would catch anyone who might fall off a cliff. This meant he would be protecting the children from falling into a world of misery and phoniness. He sees children as symbols of goodness and innocence, and whom he would like to shield against corruption. By pretending to be the catcher, shows he is unrealistic to himself and the world. He believed he could change the world, the way people behaved, and that he could stop all the phoniness in the world. He attempted to rub out a bad word outside of Phoebes school.
He was successful but then he came to the realization that could not alter everything. He later found another bad word sign and this time he could not remove it. He thought that there would be a million signs just like that one in the world. There was no way he could rub out all of them. The more he thought about it, the more he realized how powerless he was in the world.
He could not be the catcher in the rye. Holden is a troubled teenager who cannot seem to do anything right in the eyes of society or find a place where he can fit in. He tried to search for genuine people, but he found nearly everyone to be fake. One example is he observed that his roommate, Ward Stradlater, took advantage of others and lived by false values. Another example is when movie stars think they are better than everyone else.
It was these kinds of qualities that Holden did not want kids to possess. He was trying to protect them against the adult world and was catching them before they fell. Holden had already seen too many falls. It was these people who fell into the category of non-phoniness. James Castle fell out of the window and Allie fell to death. He thought they had been eaten by phoniness and that they did not have a catcher to protect them from harm.
Holden wanted to prevent this from happening again by being the catcher himself. By being the catcher he distanced himself from many characters in the book. He stayed away from anyone whom he thought was phony, hypocritical, or had bad habits. He rejected them and they rejected him. Holden had told Sally to run away with him to the west, but she thought he was crazy. Both Carl Luce and Robert Ackley had told him to grow up.
In the end, Holden regards them as phonies. The only people that he accepted were children or dead people. Holden saw the world as phony and pretentious, he wanted to save the innocent, such as Phoebe, from going into the materialistic adult world. His wish to be a catcher showed his unrealistic view towards himself and everyone. Holden finally realizes he cannot be the catcher in the rye because he is helpless against a world full of phonies. Holden is alienated because he cannot conform to the materialistic adult world.
His downfall is when he is sent to a psychiatric hospital because of his mental breakdown so he could rest before dying and leaving the world that has defeated him.
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Research essay sample on Catcher In The Rye Holden Caulfield
