The Catcher in the Rye

Essay: Is Holden still an Authentic Teen

To be an Authentic Teen or not to be an Authentic Teen

The Teenage years, the crazy stage between naive childhood where one longs to be older and mature adulthood where one yearns for more time. In the 1951 book The Catcher in the Rye the main character, Holden Caulfield, is a teenager from a rich family, and he goes to one prep school to another after getting axed from them all after not applying himself. Finished dealing with "morons," he decides he's going to do whatever he wants until he has to report home Wednesday, in four days (52). He takes the train to New York, where he sleeps in a hotel, drinks at bars, goes through packs of cigarettes like water, and calls upon prostitutes.Holden Caulfield is still an authentic teen character because his life is unstable, his emotions get him into trouble, he faces the war between innocence and corruption, and relates to people his age.

The first way Holden is an authentic teen is that his life is a realm of instability. One way his life is unstable is that he goes from school to school, never finding a real home, observed when he's packing his skates and he says, "and here I was getting ax again" (52). Another is his trips on his own, for example, his trip to New York by himself and his trip to the West without anyone knowing where he is going. He is, also, vacillation because he changes his mind frequently throughout the book, for instance when he decides to go to New York his first plan was to go to Brossard's room and when he planned to go to the West, at first he was just staying in New York for three days until he would have been home for Christmas vacation. His life as a teen is a proverbial rope bridge; insecure, unpredictable, and unreliable.

Another way Holden shows that he is an authentic teen is by the way his emotion contradict themselves. Holden has many emotions that are results of stress, including depression, avoiding others, agitation, and has bad feelings about himself. When he's leaving the Wicker bar and starts crying for no reason or when he breaks Phoebe's record, and he starts crying like he spilled milk, his depression is showing. Holden shows that he avoids others when he's in his dorm alone during the game, or when he can't call anyone important to himself when he goes to the payphone. He is easily agitated like when he slaps Phoebe, she simply wanted to "go with [him]," but since she wouldn't let no be no, so, enraged, he "thought [he] was going to smack her for a second. [He] really did" (206). Finally, when he is going to New York he tells a fellow students mother he is "Rudolf Schmidt, the name of the janitor," or when he's going to bars, he's only sixteen but he tells them he's old enough to drink, he lies to hide his real self (55 & 69). Through the powers of stress of which a teenager faces, Holden becomes a relatable teen.

Another emotion that make Holden an authentic teen that isn't related to stress is passion. He can get extremely riled when his passion is threatened, such as when he gets in a fight with Stradlater, trying to uphold Jane's innocence, "[keeping] all her kings in the row," he'd rather have her keep playing checker than her being given the time in the back of a car (44). He is appalled that his brother began working for Hollywood and gave up his dream to become a writer, "prostitut[ing]" himself, is another way he shows his passion, to him his brother giving up his dream for the corruption of money (2). Last, but not least, he shows his passion he tries to rub "F*** you" off the walls of Phoebe's school, trying to keep the elementary kids innocent and away from the corruption of swear words, he is trying to be a "catcher [of children] in the rye" (173 & 201-202). In a mother hen kind of way, Holden feels emotionally inclined that he needs to protect other from what they are destined for after they grow up, to learn from his teen years.

In the previous paragraph, Holden's passion was protecting the innocence of other, but, personally, he has a battle between innocence and corruption, the ever tug a war between childhood and adulthood pulling on his arms of teenagehood. Holden is intrigued by the ideas and the realm of sex and sexuality, hence him looking for "handsome[ness]" and "sexi[ness]" in both women and men, but the act of "sex is something [he] just doesn't understand," as seen when he pays a prostitute to talk with him instead of having sex with him (26,63, & 94). Furthermore he likes things to be the same, never to change or become untrustworthy, like at the museum where "everything stayed right where it was" or when Phoebe is on the merry-go-round and "[she] kept going around and around," but, he has learned, things don't stay untainted, like when Allie's circle ended (38,121, & 213) With the use of his red "people shooting hat," he protects himself in this battle and shields him from the evil elements of growing up and amplifies his Peter Pan complex (22). Before he can become a "catcher in the rye", he has to accomplish the war every teenager has faced no matter if innocence or corruption wins (173).

Finally, he is an authentic teen, because of the fact that he connects to people his age. J.D. Salinger used a unique kind of diction when he wrote Holden; he used simple, common, and informal words that every teenager would understand and repeats them over and over and over again, for example, Holden says "boy," "godd***," and "chrissakes," myriad times throughout the novel (9 & 20). Holden, like many teens, turns off the little voice in his head and does things he's not supposed to do, for instance running away from school, drinking at bars, or letting and help his sister skip school. When he imagines killing Maurice, he sees himself as a strong tough gangster-like guy, but he didn't touch a hair on his head, and wouldn't have is another way (104). Finally, he is ignored constantly, he tries to get answers to question he can't answer himself, like when he asks cab drivers, "do you happen to know where "the ducks" go in the wintertime?" he's really asking what happens to me when I change, the only answer he gets is Mother nature takes care of the ducks, or when he's with Sunny or Luce, they just shove him to the side like leftovers, because they don't care about his seemly, stupid question. Holden connects with his audience, because that audience, teenagers, can empathize with what he's going through because they're going through similar situation.

Holden Caulfield's ability to still be an authentic teenage character is due to characteristic including instability, uncontrollable emotions, an internal battle between the innocence of childhood and corruption of adulthood, and relating to others. His ability to do so creates a figure that people who are going through the same things he has, to know that they aren't alone. Through his story of a week when he was sixteen, he connects to a group of people that are lost, misunderstood, and shoved to the side, like himself. He shows them that this awkward stage is going to end because he is telling his story later in his life and someone is actually listening to him.