Something very strange has happen to me with the novel written by J.D Salinger, it’s not the first time I read it (I had previously read it while I was in high school) however, when I started reading the novel for this course and as I went through the pages, I felt that I was reading a completely different story from the one I had read like 6 years ago, I was now hating the main character; weird because I had previously loved him and everything he represented (different vision of the world, rebelliousness, quest for identity, etc). This feeling of hatred however stopped when I reached the part in which Holden visits his little sister at their house, specially the part in which she questions him about what he wants, and the answer he gives killed me and made reflect on it because I hadn’t consider it when I read the novel for the first time.
Holden has a strongly need for protecting the children (particularly their innocence) from the world that adults have created, or from the way adults behave within the society, society in which they act “phony” as Holden says meaning that they pretend to be something they are not. He wants to become a protector for all the kids as he says in the novel:
“I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all” (Salinger, J. p.191).
Maybe you are wondering why this particular part of the novel made me love and reflect on the main character, it’s all about the world we are living, the world we have created, the world in which children are living. If you take the time to search in Google the word “children” and click on the News tab, you get more than a 100.000.000 results, you may be thinking that all the articles that appear might be about happy topics related to children, but that’s not the reality, most of them (not to say all of them) are news about children suffering, children escaping from terrorists attacks, children being killed, and all of that bad stuff. Can you believe that one of the articles had this title “These Syrian Children Are Hoping That Pokémon Will Finally Bring The Help They Need” (Brown H, 2016). As Brown (2016) describes “A set of pictures of children asking to be rescued while holding pictures of Pokémon has gone viral, the latest in a string of pleading pictures from Syria.” (Brown H, 2016). How, as a society we have turned the world children live into a dangerous place for them to live?
I believe that Holden was onto something, protecting the child and their innocence but I do also believe that behind that there is something more deep, something that was happening to the character; he was trying to protect his own innocence. As Chen (2009) notes in her article “Holden wishes to shelter children from any adult experiences, revealing his own fear of maturity and his dream of protecting children’s innocence, which increase his disgust for and reinforce his resistance to the “phoniness” of the adult world.” The main reason behind Holden’s attachment to his own and others children’s childhood is because he despises the world in which adults live, which is the one he and all of the children in the world will have to eventually live in.
As you are growing up and realizing that society is full of falseness, constant conflicts, superficiality, etc you realize that is completely different and opposite to the world that children are use to live in. It seems natural upon that realization that Holden would want to protect the innocence of them and his own (Who would want to live in a world like that?), as naive as that may sound.
However, nowadays it seems that we may have forgotten or stopped caring about this so called innocence during childhood because kids nowadays have to live in a world that is a constant threat to them, millions of children around the world have to escape from the horror of terrorist attacks and thousands of them are killed. When did we stopped caring?
Where is the Holden of the 21st century that wishes to protect the children? Is someone thinking about them? In the world we have built for them? Does anyone want to become a Catcher in the Rye? Would you be willing to be one?
References
Brown, H (2016, July 21). These Syrian Children Are Hoping That Pokémon Will Finally Bring The Help They Need. BuzzFeedNews. Retrieved from https://www.buzzfeed.com/hayesbrown/these-syrian-children-are-hoping-that-pokemon-will?utm_term=.js5bKo61N#.iqwBA93ZW
Chen, L (2009) An Analysis of the Adolescent Problems in The Catcher in the Rye. Asian Social Science, Vol. 5 (Nº5). Retrieved from http:// www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ass/article/viewFile/1735/1621..
Salinger, J.D (1991). The Catcher in the Rye. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company
Your post is truly interesting; I believe that you may raise awareness about how children are being raised nowadays, which of course should concern everybody, since they are the future. And what could be better than giving them the tools to create a world without phoniness? I am not referring to tools such as good education, health, or style of life; because these are a right that all people must hopefully have. I am referring to teaching them how to be truthful, honest and simple. Maybe if they live a humble life that is authentic, they may succeed on not falling into the ravine of the phony adulthood.
ResponderEliminarWhile you were reading the end of the book, didn’t you think about that the reason why he stayed with his little sister was because of that? I mean, don’t you believe that he stayed in order to teach her sister to be an honest and truthful woman? He wanted to do that perhaps because he realized that he was already rotten by the adult world…