Grief And Death In Catcher In The Rye

Grief and Death
The Catcher in The Rye is a coming of age book by J.D Salinger. At the beginning of the book the main character, Holden, gets kicked out of his highschool,Pency Prep. While Holden is packing to leave school his roommate, Stradlater, asks him if he can write a paper for him. Stradlater did not want to write the paper because he wanted to go on a date to go with someone. Holden writes the paper about his dead brother, Allie’s, baseball mitt. In the paper he shares that his brother lost a battle with leukemia and died. Holden’s grief causes him to break all the windows in the garage. Then he decides he wants to go to New York before he goes back home to his parents. Holden precedes to go on an adventure in New York. While in New York he visits many places from his childhood and reminisces about how things have changed. At last he takes his little sister ,Phoebe, to the carousel and talks about how sometimes you just have to let kids fall and get back up on their own. Holden overtime learns to work through his grief but still has room to grow. J.D Salinger uses the motif of windows and the symbol Allie’s baseball mitt to show how it is hard to deal with grief and death.

Holden was thinking of his brother when he was at his lowest and wished he was still alive. Another example of how people may use a lot of things to cope with death is “I went over and pulled it right out of his goddamn hand. Then tore it up”(22). Stradlater came back from his date and got mad that Holden wrote about Allie’s baseball mitt. Holden is showing how sensitive he can get when someone would talk about his brother and how furious he could get. Holden writes about how he wishes his brother was still alive and that is another sign of grief still taking