Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye as a Universal Social Critic

Abstract

This paper is mostly about how and why J. D. Salinger's novel, The Catcher in the Rye should be taken as not just a novel indicting the diseased, contemporary American society in its disguise of a teen-novel, but rather as a universal fiction dealing with the landscape of modern wasteland, with the teen-hero, Holden Caulfield as its spokesman. The novel, which could be even subtitled as "A Catalogue of What Makes Us Sad," focuses on human emotional pain and unidentifiable humiliation on multi-layered levels, in other words, the novel exposes in its disguise "what is forbidden us to say," as Anna Freud commented on it. This paper argues that in the novel the main sources of social malaise are roughly six dimensions: Capitalism and class system; mass culture; institutionalism and bureaucracy; sexuality; Naturalistic contingency and lastly, miscommunication. Cather delineates, above all, how capitalism and class society based on materialism have devastated and alienated human life. And the theme of vulgar and commercialized mass culture takes a central position in the novel. Catcher also draws on how bureaucratized institutions (here in the name of "academia") could make man miserable and inhuman. Sexuality, too, is an important topic in Salinger's list of the modern wasteland, also as a by-product of all those socio-economic malaises. Naturalistic contingency, the power of fate (here represented by the sudden death of Holden's younger brother, Allie) is also an important item in Salinger's list of human tragedy. And lastly, Salinger brings up the problem of the hardship of real, human communication in the midst of all those social pretensions and ritualistic, social gestures. The last part of this paper also explains how the novel provides the Modernist vision through the redemptive "carousal scene," in which the hero, Holden experiences the epiphany of true, human communion with his younger sister, Phoebe. This paper concludes that however dubious it might be whether Catcher would remain as a timeless classic far into the future, it is certain that the novel in its disguise of a light teen-novel, successively calls into question modern complacency mostly based on materialism and anti-individualism, and further, the novel also envisions the possibility of a better, happier community through the Modernist "carousal scene."