Throughout the novel, Holden seems to be excluded from and victimized by the world around him. As he says to Mr. Spencer, he feels trapped on “the other side” of life, and he continually attempts to find his way in a world in which he feels he doesn’t belong.
As the novel progresses, we begin to perceive that Holden’s alienation is his way of protecting himself. Just as he wears his hunting hat (see “Symbols,” below) to advertise his uniqueness, he uses his isolation as proof that he is better than everyone else around him and therefore above interacting with them. The truth is that interactions with other people usually confuse and overwhelm him, and his cynical sense of superiority serves as a type of self-protection. Thus, Holden’s alienation is the source of what little stability he has in his life.
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As readers, we can see that Holden’s alienation is the cause of most of his pain. He never addresses his own emotions directly, nor does he attempt to discover the source of his troubles. He desperately needs human contact and love, but his protective wall of bitterness prevents him from looking for such interaction. Alienation is both the source of Holden’s strength and the source of his problems. For example, his loneliness propels him into his date with Sally Hayes, but his need for isolation causes him to insult her and drive her away. Similarly, he longs for the meaningful connection he once had with Jane Gallagher, but he is too frightened to make any real effort to contact her. He depends upon his alienation, but it destroys him.
Foreshadowing is central to the narrative structure of The Catcher in the Rye. The novel opens with Holden living with his brother D.B. in Los Angeles after having been placed in an unspecified medical facility. He then goes on to recount the events leading up to his hospitalization. As Holden puts it to the reader: “I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.” His use of the word “madman” and the euphemism “run-down” suggests the nature of his breakdown without explaining it in full, but Holden’s narrative allows the reader to speculate about possible reasons for his hospitalization.
The Origin Of Holden’s Breakdown
Throughout the novel, Holden frequently states that he feels depressed, and often entertains morbid thoughts. For example, after Maurice punches him in the gut, Holden thinks, “What I really felt like, though, is committing suicide. I felt like jumping out the window.” Holden’s suicidal thoughts in this scene are echoed later in the novel when he recalls James Castle, a classmate at a previous prep school who jumped out a window. Holden’s fate seems linked to that of Castle, who happened to be wearing a turtleneck he borrowed from Holden when he died. The reader also deduces that Holden has a history of violent outbursts. For instance, Holden explains that his parents planned to have him “psychoanalyzed” after he “broke all the windows in the garage” following his brother Allie’s death. The reader also witnesses Holden’s violence directly when he attacks Stradlater, trying to hit him “right smack in the toothbrush, so it would split his goddam throat open.”
Holden’s Return Home
When Holden decides to leave Pencey Prep a few days early, he says he “sort of needed a little vacation” before returning to his family’s house, but automatically tells the cab driver to take him to his parent’s house, foreshadowing his eventual return home. During his time in New York Holden attempts to live like a sophisticated, independent adult. He rents a hotel room, goes to fancy nightclubs, and moves around the city on his own. But Holden is in many ways still a child, and his attempts to return to his parent’s house indicate that he is not ready to be independent. When he leaves his house after talking with Phoebe, he wishes his parents would wake up and find him: “I figured if they caught me, they caught me. I almost wished they did, in a way.” Then, when Phoebe makes him promise to go home instead of running away, he tells us “I really did go home afterward.” Throughout the novel, Holden has been attempting to resist the draw of his childhood home, and in the end, he gives in.
The tone of The Catcher in the Rye is often sarcastic and judgmental, yet reveals Holden’s longing for connection and frustration in achieving it. Holden often uses sarcasm to hold himself above other characters and prove his superiority to people he finds less intelligent. In the first chapter, for example, Holden watches a football game from afar and thinks, “You were supposed to commit suicide or something if old Pencey didn’t win.” In making this darkly comic remark about suicide, Holden expresses contempt for his classmates who care about the game. Similarly, when he tries to chat up a female out-of-towner in the hotel bar, she is not particularly forthcoming, and he responds, “You’re a very good conversationalist.” Yet despite his judgment of most people (children being the notable exception), Holden also often expresses compassion toward others, saying that he feels sorry for them. He feels disgusted by Mr. Spencer’s “ratty bathrobe” and his use of “phony” words like “grand,” and yet he tells the reader, “I felt sorry as hell for him.” Holden wields sarcasm and judgment to keep others and his feelings for them at a distance. However, moments of compassion reveal that he also desires connection.
The tone of Holden’s narration also contains nostalgia for his own childhood, a time he romantically associates with innocence and purity. Holden’s happiest memories come from his youth when he took school trips to the Museum of Natural History, which felt like “the only nice, dry, cozy place in the world.” For Holden, childhood itself seems to be “the only nice, dry, cozy place in the world,” a time when innocence has yet to be infected by the phoniness of the world. Holden’s nostalgia is ironic, however, as he is not much older than a child himself. He insists his height and streak of gray hair make him appear older than he is, but none of the adults in the novel are fooled – for example, the waiter in the Lavender Bar, who refuses to serve him alcohol. Holden’s nostalgic belief that childhood is a static time of warmth and security is also naively immature – in fact, childhood is a time of drastic change, and is not necessarily safe or innocent, as evidenced by the fact that Allie died when he was still a child.
The overall tone of the novel mirrors Holden’s cynicism more than it refutes it. Though he meets some adults who treat him with compassion, like the nuns he talks to at the coffee shop or the woman running the coat check at the Wicker Bar, most of the adult characters are presented fairly unsympathetically. For example, the dialogue of the women he meets in the Lavender Bar encourages the reader to think Holden is accurate in describing them as “real morons.” Carl Luce does seem as pretentious as Holden believes him to be, using affected phrases like “must we pursue this horrible trend of thought,” and “I simply happen to find Eastern philosophy more satisfactory than Western.” Other adults take advantage of Holden, most notably Maurice and Sunny, who rob him and beat him up. Even the characters who are nice to Holden, such as Mr. Spencer and Mr. Antolini, appear more pathetic than admirable. Mrs. Morrow is depicted as kind but deluded about her son’s true nature. By portraying many of the adults as pretentious, self-deluded, and unsavory, Salinger presents a pessimistic, cynical tone that suggests Holden has little to look forward to in the adult world and is right to resist growing up.
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