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The book is about a young character’s growth to maturity, bildungsroman is a novel that deals with the formative years of the main character his psychological development and moral education, it usually ends on a positive note with the hero’s foolish mistakes and painful disappointment over and a life of usefulness ahead, the novel is actually a story of a teenager who is abandoning a childhood life and moving towards adulthood. The teenager Holden Caulfield narrates as the first person, describing what himself sees and experiences, providing his own commentary on the events and the people he describes. Holden’s tone varies between disgust, cynicism, bitterness and nostalgic longing, the protagonist experiences internal conflict, part of him wants to connect with other people on an adult level and more specifically to have sexual encounter - while part of him wants to reject the adult world as “phony” and to retreat into his own memories of childhood.
Holden is already a teenager when we meet him, he develops during the story, he is an unhappy teenager who questions how to live in a world that is often difficult to live in, in addition he is not satisfied at all when he is in school and he keeps thinking about leaving it and therefore also leaving his fellow students, who he is annoying constantly, this shows clearly the gradual development in his mind and his distance to his social connections, which is just getting bigger and is a result of the process of maturity. Holden resists his own development towards maturity and wishes for others to do the same, wishes “ to retreat “backwards into the world he is leaving that of childhood innocence rather than advance into adolescence, maturity and the world of adult American society, furthermore, by wearing his hat backwards, Holden resembles baseball catcher, this resemblance connects Holden to his dream of becoming a catcher of innocent children who come too close to the cliff edge of a field of rye. Though he wears it backwards like a baseball cap, the red hunting hat is a bizarre accessory for Holden, considering that he does not hunt in the conventional sense of the term, when Ackley question Holden for wearing deer hunting hat, Holden corrects him, saying “This is a people shooting hat……I shoot people in this hat”(page 22), therefore, Holden identifies the hat with his aggressive tendencies towards others, especially those of the adult world, as a protector of innocence, Holden often verbally attack or shoot phony people who accept the artificiality and conventionality of growing up, thus, the red hunting hat manifests Holden’s clinging to his childhood and his struggle to come to age.
While most coming of age stories show the main character’s movement from childhood or youth to adulthood, Holden is more complicated because growing up is about the last thing he wants to do. The writer of the novel dumps us straight in the middle of Holden’s maturation. He has lost his innocence but has not quite made it into adulthood, in fact, making it into adulthood, which to him is synonymous with “phonyhood” is about the last thing he wants to do, only in the end when he seems to realise that being a adult does not have to mean being a phony.
Holden is an unusual protagonist for a bildungsroman because his central goal is to resist the process of maturity itself, his thoughts about the Museum of Natural History demonstrate that Holden fears change and is overwhelmed by complexity, he wants everything to be easily understandable and externally fixed, like the statues of Eskimos and Indians in the museum. He is frightened because he is guilty of the sins he criticizes in others and because he cannot understand everything around him, nevertheless, he refuses to acknowledge this fear, expressing it only in a few instances, for example, when he talks about sex and admits that “sex is something I just don’t understand I swear to God I don’t”(chapter 9), instead of acknowledging that adulthood scares and mystifies him, Holden invents a fantasy that adulthood is a world of superficiality that adulthood is a world of superficiality and hypocrisy “phoniness” while childhood is a world of innocence, curiosity and honesty. Nothing reveals his image of these two worlds better than his fantasy about the catcher in the rye, he imagines childhood as an idyllic field of rye in which children ramp and play, adulthood for the children of this world is perceived by Holden as equivalent to death, a fatal fall over the edge of a cliff, Holden’s created understandings of childhood and adulthood allow him to cut himself off from the world by covering himself with a protective armor of cynicism.
Holden is contemptuous, bitter and judgmental not just in the beginning but throughout the entire novel, he is constantly judging everyone he comes into contact with, though the event takes place several months apart, Holden’s attitude is consistent, he continues to have a cynical patronizing and overall pessimistic outlook on people and life in general.
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