Fraternal Love

The catcher in the rye by J. D. Salinger, shows us two Holden Caulfield, one that writes the novel from an asylum and other that lives the history. For the purpose of this blog, I’m going to talk about the “second” Holden, who is the one that goes through different situations in the course of the history. Well, this Holden is a boy who doesn´t fit into his group, as he has something special; he wants to protect children. I believe that his need to protect kids, come from his love for them, especially for his sister, since he feels that Phoebe and all children are pure. Hence I can say that “time” is Holden’s enemy, as time goes on people grow old and therefore, they lose their innocence which is the only thing that connects them with the world. 

Throughout Holden’s life, he had been surrounded by inefficient adults, starting from his parents who do not seem to understand him, they change him from school to school regularly, without noticing that the problem might not be Holden’s behavior, but their own. In addition, this nonchalant behavior of Holden’s parents might be the reason why he looks for some kind of relationship with other adults, to see if they can actually help him with his issues. Holden Caulfield wants to feel a parental love, that’s why he hires a whore NOT to have sex with her, but to have someone to talk to.

I believe that the situation described above might be related to something that is happening nowadays in our society, as people continues to be more individualistic forgetting how to communicate with their own families. Family lunch might be one example of this, since in our current society this meal is disappearing little by little, as the members of the family prefer to have lunch on their own bedrooms to watch their favorite series or TV shows. 

Family meetings are the ones that create memories and strengthen the relationship between kids and their parents. Sadly, nowadays the mothers and fathers of this world, prefer to give tablets and Iphones to kids instead of giving them quality time of fraternal love. This may be the reason why this kids are looking for love in other places (such as on internet, which by the way, is quite dangerous as they’ll never know if the person they are talking to is actually the  person he/she says to be) rather than their families, just as Holden did.

The hatred that Holden Caulfield develops to adults is huge, he says that he doesn´t want to grow up, but at the same time, with his 16 years he acts like an adult! He drinks and smokes and flirts with older women, so what he says and how he acts like might be a little contradictory. Salinger doesn’t want to write a naturalist novel, but a novel of selection; he wants us to construct the history in our minds, that’s why we might have that feeling of “contradictory events” such as the one I mentioned above, however, that’s the author’s idea, not to create a full one-sense novel, but to create a book in which lots of things can be seen from different angles and perspectives.