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Abstract. This philosophical treatment of J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye critically examines the stylistic and situational choices by which the author portrays a callow youth growing up absurd in post-World War ii America. The portrait of youthful alienation that Salinger paints in the novel needs to be understood as an abstraction from Salinger's very individual, fictional cameo of Holden Caulfield as filled with a self-loathing he projects onto others because of his unresolved sense of loss and survivor's guilt over the death by leukemia of his younger brother, Allie.
"Almost every time somebody gives me a present, it ends up making me sad."
-Holden caulfield in J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
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J. D. SALINGER'S TALE of juvenile weltschmerz, The Catcher in the R ye,1 portrays a personal psychology of youthful disillusion. Holden caulfield, the novel's narrator and antihero, embarks on an existential odyssey in new York city after being drummed out of his fourth private prep school for failing grades.
Smart and resourceful enough when the occasion requires, Holden is disgusted with virtually everything and everyone around him. By maintaining a negative attitude, he excuses himself in his own mind from doing anything potentially disappointing-it is all futile and pointless anyway. Holden thereby cultivates an attitude that prevents him from devoting his energies to doing anything worthwhile at all. The reader can only observe as Holden reveals more and more about himself and wonder why the boy is so out of step with everyone around him; why he is socially so increasingly self-destructive.
We are permitted to eavesdrop on Holden's phenomenology in his writing-the novel itself as we have it from Salinger's pen. Although it is never made clear for whom Holden believes himself to be writing, he addresses "you" in several places, and the internal evidence of the book suggests that he is writing these recent first-person memoirs and remarks in the novel's twenty-six chapters as perhaps both a diagnostic and a therapeutic exercise from the vantage of a clinic or hospital. Holden caulfield is not posing as a young man sick of life. He is the genuine article, and he is genuinely ill. But from what? What is his illness, and how and why...