Catcher In The Rye Theme Essay

Themes in Catcher in the Rye
In 1951, JD Salinger published a novel titled The Catcher in the Rye. Between the years of 1945 and 1951, Salinger had changed his concept of the misfit hero from a pathetically misunderstood protagonist who seemed doomed to a less than average life, to a protagonist who has learned to surpass the morons and show them compassion through somewhat condescending gestures. The latter is the present day Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye. Holden presents himself as a mature young man, but the theme of phoniness and preservation of innocence against the fake world of adults run strong throughout Salinger’s novel.
Peter Seng writes in his essay “The Fallen Idol: The Immature World of Holden
Caulfield” that Holden hates lies, phoniness, pretense but these are often his own sins, not just of those around him. Seng says that Holden thinks of others as worthless in their actions, but then reveals those same traits later throughout the plot (Seng, 63, print). Holden has a roommate named Ward Stradlater who Holden doesn’t care for too much. He thinks of Stradlater as self-obsessed and phony so when Stradlater takes Holden’s childhood crush Jane Gallagher and “makes time” with her in the backseat of a car, Holden is enraged.
He thinks that Stradlater is too obsessed with girls and sex, but as soon as he gets to New York, Holden attempts to “make time” with first a stripper, then a hotel call girl, and then he finally calls in a prostitute to try and do the dead.
Holden displays here the same phoniness and that he hated so much in Stradlater. At the Wicker Bar in New York, Holden goes on about the place, saying that “it’s one of those places that are supposed to be very sophisticated and all, and the phonies are coming out the window.” Holden goes on to describe everyone in there as phonies and louses, but he is in the bar by choice. In the Wicker Bar, Holden is just as much a phony as the rest in there because he, too, is chatting up the “flits” and ordering his Scotch and sodas standing up so the bartender would think him bigger than he really is, not unlike the other men at the bar next to him that he couldn’t stand to look at. Throughout the novel, Holden demonstrates the phony characteristics that he hates in others in his own actions.
Warren French, a critic on JD Salinger, says in his book JD Salinger Revisited that Holden shares a lot of the phoniness that he points out in others, like lying, pretense, and social compromise (like Seng pointed out in his essay), but he still has genuine passion and feelings that the modern conformist no longer have (French, 39, print). Critic Seng writes in his essay, “as sensitive and perceptive as Holden is, he is still an adolescent and so an immature judge of adult life” (Seng, 68, print). Seng’s criticism supports French’s in that Holden may still have be more perceptive than the average person, but he is still a child at heart. This is shown throughout the novel, first of all back at Pencey when Holden is in his room with a classmate. He says, “Sometimes I horse around quite a lot, just to keep from getting bored” and then proceeds to act as if he was a blind man and his classmate his mother. Later on at Pencey, he’s talking to another classmate in the bathroom and starts to tap dance.
Holden’s innocence is also shown throughout the book through Salinger’s use of symbols.
Holden visits the Natural History Museum where he used to go as a child. When he goes in, he notes how the displays of the fake Eskimos and stuffed deer and birds never change, the only thing that changes is the person looking through the cases. This shows the theme of innocence even as a young man, or stopped time. This is also shown with the ducks staying in the pond even though it’s winter and they should be migrating. Lastly, childhood and stopped time are shown in Holden’s deceased brother Allie’s baseball glove that Holden keeps. The glove is a representation of what Holden and Allie used to do together before Allie died when they were young kids. Seng describes Salinger’s depiction of Holden’s childlike qualities as “a latter day Peter Pan … a little boy who never grows up but continues to indulge his juvenile fantasies” (Finch, 40, print). The idea of a teenager with an innocent view of the world seems sort of phony and far-fetched in its own way, further supporting the ongoing theme of phoniness in Salinger’s
novel.
In his essay, Seng writes that Holden sees a world that belongs to adults. They fill it with phoniness, pretense, social compromise, but Holden wants a world with honesty, sincerity, simple, a world of children and caretakers. This is why Holden has the idea of his ideal position being a Catcher in the Rye. He gets this idea from a poem bye Robert Burns, the lines of his inspiration being “If a body catch a body / Coming through the rye.” Holden would be the only older kid in a field of thousands of little kids and he would be standing on the edge of a cliff, ready to catch anyone if they started to fall off. He would be catching children falling off the cliff into adulthood. By catching the kids before they fall, Holden wants the children’s innocence to be preserved and not to be exposed by the phony, evil world of adults.
Salinger’s revolutionary novel is tied together by the theme of phoniness in the adult world, and Holden’s efforts to resist the adult life by preserving innocence and acting in childlike ways. Holden’s constant battering of other people’s supposed falseness is reflected into his own behavior, Salinger’s use of youthful symbols like museums and baseball gloves show Holden’s mild obsession with childhood, and his dream of being a Catcher in the Rye proves that he feels as though the pretense and phoniness of the adult world is something worth resisting. All of these things make Salinger’s novel both controversial and revolutionary.

Works Cited
Finch, Warren. J.D. Salinger, Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Print.

Seng, Peter. “The Fallen Idol: The Immature World of Holden Caulfield.” J.D. Salinger and the Critics. Ed. William F. Belcher and James W. Lee. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1962. 60-68. Print.