Who is holden caulfield talking to

That is a large burden for so fragile a literary character, and will turn out eventually to be either aesthetic salvation for The Catcher in the Rye , or a prime cause for its dwindling down to the status of a period piece.

There are very ambiguous elements, moreover, in the portrait of this sad little screwed-up hero. The only real creation or half-creation in this world is Holden Caulfield himself. If this hero really represents the nonconformist rebellion of the Fifties, he is a rebel without a past, apparently, and without a cause.

There is no point in multiplying examples, Holden obviously fails to see that his criticisms apply to himself. If, however, we think that his failure to practice what he preaches invalidates his criticisms, we fall into an argumentum ad hominum —we cannot justify our shortcomings by pointing the finger of scorn at our critics, especially if you do not wish to admit that we are as sick as they are.

Like many sensitive but immature people, Holden is not yet well enough in control of his faculties to see the application of his strictures to himself.

Salinger is not offering Holden to the world as an example of what it should be. The popularity of the novel suggests, however, that fully literate youth in our society finds it especially easy to identify with Holden. John W. The innocence of Mr. He has objects for his contempt but no objects other than his sister for his love. He is forced, consequently, simply to register his contempt, his developing disillusionment; and it is inevitable that he should seem after a time to be registering it in a vacuum, for just as he can find no concrete equivalent in life for the ideal which he wishes life to embody, so the persons on whom he registers his contempt seem inadequate to it and unjustly accused by it.

The boorish prep school roommate, the hypocritical teacher, the stupid women in the Lavender Room, the resentful prostitute, the conventional girl friend, the bewildered cab driver, the affected young man at the theater, the old friend who reveals that his interest in Holden is homosexual—these people are all truly objectionable and deserve the places Holden assigns them in his secret hierarchy of class with its categories of phonies, bores, deceivers, and perverts.

But they are nonetheless human, albeit dehumanized, and constitute a fair average of what the culture affords. They are part of the truth which Holden does not see and, as it turns out, is never able to see—that this is what one part of humanity is: the lies, the phoniness, the hypocrisy are the compromises which innocence is forced by the world to make.

He remains at the end what he was at the beginning—cynical, defiant, and blind. And as for ourselves, there is identification but no insight, a sense of pathos but not of tragedy. It may be that Mr. It was easy enough to identify with his adolescent angst, but his puerile attitudinizing was something else altogether. That was then.

This is half a century later. The novel is commonly represented as an expression of adolescent cynicism and rebellion—a James Dean movie in print—but from first page to last Salinger wants to have it both ways. Indeed a case can be made that The Catcher in the Rye created adolescence as we now know it, a condition that barely existed until Salinger defined it. He established whining rebellion as essential to adolescence and it has remained such ever since.

Morris Longstreth, reviewing the novel in the Christian Science Monitor , Twice there is a reminder of Shakespeare. It could be debated long just how irrational is Holden Caulfield, as likewise, Hamlet.

Holden, who is the clown, villain, and even moderately, the hero of this tale, is asked not to return to his school after Christmas. This is his third expulsion and he cannot endure to face his parents, so he hides out in New York, where his conduct is a nightmarish medley of loneliness, bravado, and supineness. He is as unbalanced as, a rooster on a tightrope. He was left-handed. The thing that was descriptive about it, though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere.

In green ink. He got leukemia and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18, He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent. He was terrifically intelligent. His teachers were always writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allie in their class.

They really meant it. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at anybody. I was only thirteen, and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage.

I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. Sitting in his hotel room in New York, Holden feels he is sunk, and he starts talking to Allie. Hurry up. I did. By the time Stradlater returns from his date with Jane, Holden is sure that he has slept with her, and Stradlater helps him to think so, without being actually caddish.

Stradlater asks for the composition; he is furious when he reads it, because it is about a baseball glove rather than a room or a house. Holden tears the composition up. He has a fight with Stradlater and gets a bloody nose.

Holden goes to say goodbye to Mr. Spencer, his nice old history teacher. It worries the boy that while his teacher is saying edifying valedictory things to him, he becomes acutely concerned about the winter quarters of the ducks in the Central Park lagoon.

In his confusion, he sees this behavior as a weakness that may even call for psychotherapy. His interactions with the prostitute Sunny are comic as well as touching, partly because they are both adolescents trying to be adults. Although Sunny is the more frightening of the two, neither belongs there. Holden is literally about to crash. Near the beginning as well as the end of the novel, he feels that he will disappear or fall into an abyss when he steps off a curb to cross a street.

Sometimes when this happens, he calls on his dead brother, Allie , for help. Part of Holden's collapse is due to his inability to come to terms with death. Thoughts of Allie lying in his grave in the cemetery in the rain, surrounded by dead bodies and tombstones, haunt Holden. He wants time itself to stop. He wants beautiful moments to last forever, using as his model the displays in glass at the Museum of Natural History, in which the same people are shown doing the same things year after year.

Mike Jul 27, AM 0 votes. I always thought that he was talking to the doctors, like Sam said. He's telling the story of his mental breakdown to a shrink. Dani Jul 05, PM 0 votes. Holden's story is his journal as requested by his doctor in the psych ward.

He is introducing himself to his journal Monty J Heying Intriguing perspective, Dani. I talk to myself in a similar way in my journal. Jul 20, PM. Susana May 10, AM 0 votes. I think you could think that if it weren't for the beggining of the book, when Holden introduces himself. View 2 comments. Add a reference: Book Author. Search for a book to add a reference.

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