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Catcher In The Rye Research Paper

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J.D Salinger is an author that has been through a lot in his life and still not a lot is known about him or his life. and yet his characters in his novels show how he thinks and what he has gone through in a certain way.In his story, The Catcher in the Rye, we follow the experiences of a young teenager named Holden Caulfield. Throughout the story Holden expresses his experiences, problems, and thoughts which can be compared to those of Salinger. Their youth, schooling habits and experiences, and the way they view the world and the people in it are can be considered very similar. To begin, the two grew up in a very similar way. The two of them grew up in New York. Additionally, both of their families were well off, which showed them the more …show more content…

They both believe that most people are “phony” and “not real”. As a result, they search for people who are real and down to earth. Because of those “phony people the two prefer to live in a secluded lifestyle. therefore Salinger moves from the loud New York City to the quiet secluded Cornish, New Hampshire. Similarly Holden talks about leaving New York and going west several times to live by himself. Additionally, they have both been traumatized in some sort of way. For Salinger, he fought in World War II and came back from D-Day, The Battle of the Bulge, and Liberating Concentration camps. “The concentration camps particularly upset him. In her memoir, his daughter Margaret recalled her father telling her, ‘You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely. No matter how long you live,’"( Shmoop.com ). This resulted in Salinger coming home with ptsd. Holden on the other hand lost his little brother to leukemia, and in reaction to this holden broke all the windows in his garage and had to be hospitalized. As a result of the trauma that these two have endured, they search, protect, and reach out to the minds and bodies of the children in the world who still have their innocence and they try to protect it from being destroyed by the things that destroyed their lives. This leads to the reason in which why Holden wants to be “The Catcher in the

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