Holden Caulfield's Mental Breakdow

Holden’s Mental Breakdown

The Catcher in the Rye is a novel about an adolescent boy struggling with the idea of adulthood and all the impurities it contains. The teenaged boy, Holden Caulfield, is slightly psychologically unstable and does not do well in any of his classes a preparatory school, because he refuses to apply himself. Holden experiences a mental breakdown as a result of tragic events in his past, his perception of the world, specifically the adults, and the effect it has on him, and his raging hormones.

There are two main events from Holden's past that had great effect on shaping Holden's turbulent personality. The first of which was the death of his dear younger brother Allie who Holden idolizes to immeasurable bounds. Allie's death was a great tragedy to Holden and led to his admission to an asylum after his initial violent emotional collapse. In a frenzy of sadness and frustration on the night that Allie died, Holden smashed all the windows in his garage with his bare fists. “I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my first just for the hell of it." (Salinger 50). Allie’s death an enormous and negative impact on Holden from which he never fully recovers. The reader can see the continuing effect of the death when he’s talks about how he currently feels about him: "I know he's dead! … Just because somebody's dead, you don't just stop liking them, for God's sake-especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that're alive and all" (223). He even says at one point in the book that he still talks to Allie and uses him for comfort. The second impactful tragedy that negatively affects Holden’s mental stability is the death of James Castle. James is a “skinny little weak-looking guy, which wrists about as big as pencils" (221). He commits suicide after being bullied, and the bullies only faced menial charges such as expulsion afterwards. This horribly sad event just furthers Holden’s exposure to the bad that exists in all people.

Holden perceives the world in an extremely pessimistic way, and it causes him to feel depressed much of the time. He cynically labels almost every adult he encounters as a ‘phony’ and thinks that children are forced to turn into one after losing their innocence by witnessing the cruelties and sicknesses of the world. An example of his attitude towards adults can be found on page 67, “You never saw so many phonies in all your life, everybody smoking their ears off and talking about the play so that everybody could hear and know how sharp they were.” He spends much of his time trying to save the innocence of children, and Salinger turns this whole idea into a major theme of the novel through Holden’s commentary on the world around him. Holden says that “Certain things they should stay the way they are” (100), and this belief sheds insight on his protective nature over the innocence of children. These sardonic views that Holden has contribute to his mental breakdown by causing him to feel alienated by everyone, which I believe leads to his depressive outlooks.

The final contributor to Holden’s mental instability is his physical adolescence and its effects. Holden is only sixteen at the start of the novel, and it is extremely typical of a teenager to feel most of everything he goes through. After reading an article about hormones in teens, he notes that he looks exactly like the guy in the article with lousy hormones" (254). Hormonal imbalance in teens is a common cause of crazy, unpredictable emotional fluctuations which can account for the depressive and angry feelings about everything, especially adults, Holden often experiences. This problem can also account for Holden’s extremely ferocious sex drive and emotional attractions to females. In the novel, Holden even admits that he’s “...probably the biggest sex maniac you ever saw. Sometimes he can think of very crumby stuff he wouldn't mind doing if the opportunity came up” (78). Holden’s disrupted hormones are a major cause of his emotional instability, which is a direct cause of his mental breakdown.

The Catcher in the Rye, written by J.D. Salinger, is a bildungsroman, meaning it focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, from youth to adulthood, or his or her coming of age. In his coming of age, Holden struggles with constant feelings of alienation, disgust, and hatred, and these, accompanied with the disappointment of most people in his life due to his mediocrity in school and everything else, contribute to his mental breakdown that winds him up in a mental institute at the start of the novel.