Holden has been told many times to grow up, like mr.spencer told him to stradlater told him and carl luce etc. holden isn't legally a adult but he thinks he has adult features such as gray hair, and he's tall. With Holden and Phoebe Holden’s the child and Phoebe is the adult. The reason why Phoebe is so mad at him for getting kicked out of school is that this happens a lot and she had faith in him.…
As the reader, one can see many similarities between Holden and Phoebe, but one that changes a mass of thing is the way they each view one another. Holden does not view many people with an optimistic perspective. The reader can tell this when Holden expresses his feelings and says, "One of the biggest reasons I left Elkton was because I was surrounded by phonies... Mr. Haas, was the phoniest bastard, I have ever met in my life."(2.60) However he expresses to his readers how"pretty and smart" Phoebe is and gives more of optimistic feedback than he does with everyone else. Phoebe is more honest and candid with Holden rather than a "phony" like everyone else. Phoebe shows affection towards her brother when she challenges him when shoe forces…
"The Catcher in the Rye" opens with Holden Caulfield at Pency Prep, his high school, where he has just been kicked out for failing almost all of his classes. Holden, as a lost and frustrated teen, goes to his room for his last night before planning to run away from Pency Prep for some "alone time" before telling his parent he was kicked out of another school.…
Being flunked out of school made Holden think bad about himself, he started to imagine himself dying and ending it all, but when he went to go visit Phoebe he knew that he could not leave her behind anymore and knows he now needs to stay with…
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Salinger was drafted into the army, serving from 1942-'44. His short military career saw him land at Utah Beach in France during the Normandy Invasion and be a part of the action at the Battle of the Bulge. Salinger continued to write, assembling chapters for a new novel whose main character was a deeply unsatisfied young man named Holden Caulfield. Salinger did not escape the war without some trauma, and when it ended he was hospitalized after suffering a nervous breakdown…
Holden Caulfield is a very sophisticated character created by J.D. Salinger, not comparable to many characters in other novels. One character he relates strongly with is Phoebe Caulfield. As Holden superior in age to Phoebe, she is clearly the more mature person in state of mind. Phoebe tries to be the best that she can be in school, achieving A’s on almost everything she does, while Holden doesn’t apply himself in anything but English class. One thing that they have in common is the knowledge to have a good conversation, something that most people don’t have. With their many differences, Holden still admires Phoebe and wishes to talk to her whenever he can, because she is about the only person that is willing to talk to a crazy person.…
Phoebe was one the only person who Holden could openly talk to and share his ideas with. She was the closest person in his life instead of friends such as Ackley or Stradlater. Something that I learned from this section of The Catcher in the Rye is the fact that the smallest things in life can make people happy. For Holden, that was watching his sister ride on a…
In contrast to Holden’s younger brother, Holden’s older brother D.B does not provide Holden with a sense of security. “If there’s one thing [Holden] hates, it’s the movies” (Salinger 2), and coincidentally D.B just happens to work in the movie industry. Holden mentions multiple times how D.B has sold himself to Hollywood and “prostituted “ (Salinger 80) himself to become a screenwriter despite being a fantastic novelist, in Holden’s eyes. In the beginning, when Holden introduces his family, he implies that his relationship with D.B is not the closest; he says that he only told D.B some of the story of his three day journey, despite D.B being his “brother and all” (Salinger 1). During his three day journey, after arriving in New York, Holden considers calling up D.B, however decides against it since “D.B was in Hollywood” (Salinger 59).…
The song “All I Want” by Kodaline refers to Holden’s feelings toward Phoebe near the end of the book. For example, when Holden is delusional, he thinks he is going to die of pneumonia and says, “...so finally what I figured I’d do, I figured I’d better sneak home and see her, in case I died and all” (Salinger 156). Holden’s one wish before he dies (or so he thinks) was to go see his kid sister Phoebe. Holden has a very close relationship with his sister, and they are both very fond of the other. This mindset is displayed by the members of Kodaline when they sing “‘cause if I could see your face once more/ I could die a happy man I’m sure” (Kodaline). While “All I Want” is admittedly about a romantic relationship and not one of a sibling nature,…
In Catcher in the Rye, Holden feels that no one understands him. He is disgusted by the things that he witnesses adults do. In a hotel room he has in New York, he sees a man take out “all these women’s clothes, and put them on (61)” and he sees “a man and a woman squirting water out of their mouths at each other (62).” Holden doesn’t understand why these people are just so entertained by these unusual and frivolous acts and he even thinks that “the hotel was lousy with perverts (62).” Instead of reaching out to people who have been there for him his whole life, he goes to bars and tries to find a connection with the men and women there. Still, he cannot find anything he has in common with them, and calls them “show-offy-looking (69).” In the end, Holden finds the answers he is searching for from his ten year old sister, Phoebe. This is unusual because she has not yet reached the point where she must mature into adulthood, but Phoebe is more accepting of the change that is…
Three seconds remain in the tied basketball game. The point guard shoots and scores right before the buzzer sounds off. I bet for a long time, that player worked hard in the gym to practice and perfect his shooting for game time situations like that. It just goes to show that nothing great can ever be achieved without hard work. Holden Caulfield from The Catcher In The Rye, however, does not quite understand this saying. In the story, Holden does not apply himself to his education at Pencey Prep, which results in his expulsion from school. Throughout the story, Holden, as well as a few other characters, represent the terms expressed in Freud’s Theory of Personality known as the id, superego, and ego.…
Imagine what it feels like to be a teenager. Is a teenager considerate and open minded? The novel The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger talks about a teenager named Holden Caulfield who tells his story about a school named Pency Prep in Pennsylvania, away from his sister and parents. Throughout most of this book, Holden explains his inner thoughts regarding everyone he knows, and most of them are judgmental. Holden is considered to be a typical American teenager in this novel. First of all, teenagers like to express their thoughts. In Sylvia Plath’s article “Sylvia Plath at Seventeen”, she begins saying,“As of today I have decided to keep a diary again―just a place where I can write my thoughts and opinions when I have a moment. Somehow I…
The genuine joy Holden gets from watching Phoebe is a striking image of his fantasies of innocence and his collapsing psyche. For a moment Holden sees the joy that he envisions all the children of his rye field are like. Within Phoebe’s happiness Holden is transfixed and distraught, because the sudden realization that he is transitioning to a world he does not feel equipped for triggers the end of his ambivalence. As the carousel spins so does Holden’s reality, he loses sense of even further sense of himself. The Catcher in the Rye is a bildungsroman, but it is unique in how Holden not only resists growing up, but also he ends the novel more unstable and lost than he started off as. A quest or journey is supposed to lead to a literal or metaphorical…
The main character in Charlotte P.Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, narrates her own life and describes her struggle with depression which by the end of the story evolved into insanity. Narrator’s husband, John, treats her like a small child, forbids her to express herself, and keeps her bound to restricted room. Due to her husbands actions she becomes physically, emotionally and socially isolated, which ultimately made her insane.…
J.D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is about a young Holden Caulfield’s growth into maturity. Caulfield begins the novel as an inexperienced boarding school student attending Pencey Prep, a private boarding school located in Pennsylvania, who is struggling academically and socially. After getting kicked out of yet another boarding school, Caulfield travels to New York City before going home. After staying in New York for the time period between when he got kicked out and when he can return home Caulfield learns the struggles of living in the adult world. As he experiences New York, it opens his eyes to the painfulness of growing up and he wants to escape it. A major theme in this story is keeping innocence, which is portrayed through Caulfield’s theory about the catcher in the rye, his need to protect his sister, and the red hunting hat.…