Eternal youth or death

The catcher in the rye, written by J. D. Salinger, is the story about a boy, Holden Caulfield, who shows a rebellious personality with the people that surrounds him. He is constantly criticizing how society corrupts you when you grow up, which reminds me of several facts including other books, poems, and facts from another centuries.

The first relationship is with the novel “Lord of the flies” written by William Goulding, which sets you in the story of a group of boys that have to survive with no adults since their airplane fell in an island, so they divide each other in groups to make an easier organization for living. The similarity I see between both stories, is that when the boys are left alone in a place with no rules, there is a moment where they collapse and savagery is shown, because there is no law or protection and so chaos and violation of rules appears when children have to act like adults.

Then the deal is in growing up, children characterize with their innocence and how they are not yet “infected” with adult thinking. What happens when the natural process of life is not “respected”, when trying to be adults being children as in Lord of the Flies, where the kids ended up as savages, or when trying to maintain childhood as an adult, as The Catcher in the rye.

The catcher in the rye, in simple words shows Holden trying to emulate childhood in an adult’s body, where he describes everyone as a phony, as fake or not real, while he appears to be the only one who has remained genuine and authentic with society, because he could not identify with the experiences he had had as an adult.

As an example, “The Catcher in the rye” as most know, was also an inspiration for the killer of John Lennon, since the story can be related with a metaphor of freezing time, because when time passes and we keep growing up, we then notice that the world is disturbed. So the impulse that probably drove the killer was to prevent this disillusion of continuing meeting life imperfectly, so we could all remember the image of the this musical idol as if he was frozen. But if we also put an example of famous cases of massacres in schools in the US, commonly the murderous minds are people who could never adapt or understand common society and occidental civilization. These misfits patterns from murderers have a straight relationship with the protagonist, Holden.

When Holden explains Phoebe he has a fantasy he pictured from a poem of being a “catcher in the rye.” Holden imagines a field of rye on a cliff with children playing. He says he would like to protect the children from falling off the cliff by “catching” them. But actually Holden had mistaken the poem because he thinks it says “If a body catch a body coming through the rye,” but the actual poem says “If a body meet a body, coming through the rye.” This is where Holden shows that he would like to prevent children from falling into the adult’s world as if pain and troubles comes from becoming older.

So the reflection is in Holden wanting to prevent lifeline process from continuing, which it might see authoritarian and selfish in the same way as the killer of John Lennon. From an extremist point of view there is not a possible way of having a catcher in rye if death is not involved, stopping natural course of things would be by ending life, so you would forever remember that individual as before they died. This reminds me of post mortem photography, that was practiced during the XIX century, which consisted in photographing the recently deceased as a memorial portrait and it was not considered morbid, since it was done to remember the loved ones just how they left and were among families most precious possessions.

 She will be a child

Forever

So I see a straight relation with death, when Holden goes to a mental hospital it comes to my mind the poem Howl by Allen Ginsberg, who belonged to the Beat Generation, which is known from being inspired of his own life experiences. In the poem there is a relation with death and mental hospitals as they are a kind of concentration camps where creative minds are in captivity and are not able to express their selves, representing the US during the 50s as industries are consuming society. The similarity I see between both is that the vision Ginsberg has, shows that if something is somehow limited and if we stop things or if we are being stopped from doing, it is like being dead. In the same way as being a catcher in the rye, trying to maintain childhood and interrupting natural lifetime means death.

Ps: I apologize if a bothered someone with my thoughts and the picture of the girl.

References:

Salinger, J.D (1951). The Catcher in the Rye.

Golding, W., & Epstein, E. L. (1954). Lord of the flies: A novel. New York: Perigee

Ginsberg, A., Williams, W. C. (1959). Howl and other poems.

Kenneth, V (2003) Macmillan Encyclopedia of Death and Dying