Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
Loneliness in catcher in the rye
Loneliness in catcher in the rye
Loneliness in catcher in the rye
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Loneliness in catcher in the rye
Loneliness in catcher in the rye
Loneliness in catcher in the rye
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Loneliness in catcher in the rye
When Holden had reached the climax point of his mental state, he had a hard time to get across the street. “Every time i came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddam curb, I had this feeling that I’d never get to the other side of the street. I’d just go down, down, down and nobody’d ever see me again”. At this moment when his mental state was lost and his shield down, the loneliness consumed him. At one point he even accepted
Holden is able to face his problems because he has met the psychological “need of belonginess and love needs” when reaching his goals (Maslow’s Hierarchy). After forming a stronger relationship with Phoebe, more of his psychological needs are met; Holden feels safe trusting his sister and becomes more affiliated with others instead of using isolation as a defense mechanism. Holden’s bohemian ideology on people around him is very similar to Chris McCandless from Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. They both struggle to form connections with others and have relationship issues with their family. “He acted like it was it was hard for him to be around people...
Denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Holden is already a lonely individual. He adventures around New York City, which is highly populated, and he probably passes thousands of people, but does not understand the concept on socializing with people and respect. He often finds himself criticizing them, this keeps him isolated from everyone. Holden later finds himself trying to exempt the feeling of being lonely by calling people from his childhood, and eventually people he barely knew just so he had someone to talk to.
His parents sent him to three different prep schools, all of which he had been kicked out of. Without a solid environment, Holden has been unable to make many friends in which he can find sympathy and comfort. This makes him become an introvert. “…I was standing way the hell up on top of Thompsen Hill…” (Salinger, Page 2). He finds it hard to relate to people because they don’t understand him or his circumstances.
He is incapable of moving forward and getting closure by clinging to this fantasy and avoiding facing the realities of growing up. It is further demonstrated in the way he interacts with other characters. To avoid confronting his own issues, Holden relies on superficial relationships in the novel to form meaningful connections. When Holden considers his own future he says he does not “feel like going into it” because he is reluctant to deal with his emotions and the challenges of adulthood (224). In avoiding these challenges, Holden remains stagnant and unable to move
Firstly, we see Holden’s attempts at socialisation. Holden’s circle is reserved to rich, privileged, narrow minded kids witch he goes to school with. Holden refuses to socialise with them because they’re “phony”.
Holden is unaware of his problem. When people try to help him he tells them there is nothing wrong with him. Holden wonders why he cannot connect with others. He blames it on other people when the source of his problems is himself. Holden’s past holds him back from connecting with others, but his fear of letting go of his past has him limited and scarred from making new relationships and connections.
Throughout the novel, you can clearly feel Holden’s alienation from the rest of the novel. From Hholden’s multiple attempts of trying to interact with other people, in the novel, it is understood that he wants to connect with other people, especially adults. For example on the train to New York, Holden stated that he “enjoys taking late-night trains” because of the aloneness. In contrast, once he arrives in New York City, he starts to look for people who he can get in contact with. Holden desire for interaction suddenly becomes more drastic than before.
Throughout the novel, Holden is seen trying to make friends to feel a sense of belonging after a long time of isolation. For example, the direct speech, “yeah. I was defending your goddam honor. Stradlater said you had a lousy personality. I couldn’t let him get away with that stuff.”
Holden is not isolated from people themselves, but is unable to make a genuine human connection. He rejects all the people that he considers “friends”, calling them phonies or giving reasons why he shouldn’t talk to them. Although Holden meets a lot of people while in the city, he doesn’t actually connect with them. In one instance of the book, Holden is walking behind a family and hears a little boy singing. He says, “It made me feel better.
Holden attempts to assert himself above everybody else in society and essentially portrays that he is better than everyone. Isolation is a major characteristic in Gothic writing because it forces the audience to solely focus on the protagonists and his everyday struggles with fitting into society. Holden isolates himself from everyone by the judgment he places on people in society. This isolation correlates to him immaturity and the reason he doesn't connect with anyone. When Holden comes out of the theater and sees the phonies in the mist, he states, “At the end of the first act we went out with all the other jerks for a cigarette.
In Holden 's journey, he becomes more and more isolated from the world throughout the book. He isolates himself by choosing to not interact or go out with people. And further, when he does, he only ends up doing things that ruin the interaction with others, and makes himself become more isolated. Holden tries, but is always rejected and unsuccessful with his attempts.
After arriving, Holden “went into [a] phone booth” and spent “about twenty minutes” without calling anybody (77-78). After pondering the many people he could call, Holden finally thinks of calling “Carl Luce, but [he] didn’t like him much” (78). While Holden has many people whom he could call, he spends twenty minutes convincing himself of why he cannot call any of these people. This illustrates alienation as Holden chooses to avoid talking to others, isolating himself when he could have easily chosen to interact with others. Moreover, this alienation provides Holden with self-protection as he does not run into any chances of his parents finding out that he has been expelled from school and has run away to New York.
Holden is a very isolated person and has many things that contributed to that such as his brother’s death that was very hard to cope with. Through a series of events that happened to him, developed a very unconscious mindset which makes him relive traumatic pain as mentioned in the document Sigmund Freud Biography. Holden developed his personality because he has dealt with other things in the past such as not doing good in school, having family conflict, not being that popular, and even going from school to school because he was never doing good. These factors can all contribute to why he would prefer to be alone, because he does not find himself worthy of anything. An inference that can be made of Holden is that there is also a slight possibility that he may have been sexually assaulted even as a child,
Prologue A long time ago, before the Universe we live in even existed, Angels and Demons lived in harmony. Sadly, the peace between these two races was terribly unstable, since the hatred between Demons and Angels was extremely powerful and has lasted for several centuries. Alas, this truce wasn't intended to last as fate had in store for these opposite races. All it took to was an ignorant Angel to simply bump into a Demon, sending these opposing races into war, which had reared its ugly head, commencing the longest, most monstrous war known in history.