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How Does Holden Affect Allie's Death

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Recommended: Discuss the impact of Allie death on holden in catcher in the rye

At some point in life, everyone is going to lose someone close to them. J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye follows Holden Caulfield, whose younger brother, Allie, died at a very young age. Holden gets kicked out of four different schools and after the fourth ends up exploring New York City. The death of Allie affected Holden and all of his family in many ways. Through the effects shown in The Catcher In The Rye, Salinger depicts the struggles of grief and loss in various stages of life. Holden takes Allie's death very harshly. The night that Allie died, he slept in the garage and ended up punching out all the windows in the garage and kept going until his hand was broken and he “had to go to the hospital and all”(Salinger 201). Allie’s death affects Holden as a person, not …show more content…

As a result of this, Phoebe is forced to mature faster than a child her age normally would. Holden notes this on page 217 saying, “She sounds like a goddamn schoolteacher sometimes, and she’s only a little child.” Phoebe has to be more grown up than she should be because she has to take care of herself and those around her. She doesn’t have the same maternal care most children her age do, so she must provide herself and Holden with that care. She takes on the role of almost an older sibling to Holden, offering him advice and money when he needs it. It is not normal for a sixteen year old to ask his ten year old sister to borrow money. Phoebe is forced to care and provide for both of them, and tries to keep Holden accountable in coming back saying, “"You can take it all. You can pay me back. Bring it to the play” (Salinger 97). Phoebe gives Holden extra money so that he has more of an incentive to go to her play, at least so that he can return the change. She fears that Holden will also leave her, in the same way that D.B. left to go to Hollywood. In what seems to be a simple coming of age story,

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For instance, even after so much time has passed, Holden names his dead sibling when asked by Phoebe if there’s anything in the world he cares about. Without memories of Allie, there is apparently nothing else to fit that claim. Allie’s old baseball mitt is still Holden’s most prized possession, and, due to its close personal nature compared to any other items on hand, he writes about it for an assignment even when it goes against the prompt. Therefore, taking note of the effects the death still deals presently, and considering Holden “broke all the windows” in the garage with his fists the day after the death occurred, it makes sense to conclude Allie’s loss has caused him to embrace a jaded view of life and humanity (Salinger, 39). Despite it all, Holden’s venture to the park with Phoebe seems to

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In Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield's mental and emotional life is greatly impacted by his younger brother, Allie. Salinger presents Allie’s impact on Holden’s life through the Dick Slagle incident and the movie scenes. However the difference between the two scenes is that the Slagle scene ends with the two changing roommates, while the movie scene finishes with a happy ending. Although both of these scenes show how Holden is affected by Allie, they contrast due to Holden’s final reaction towards the two scenes. Through Holden’s expressions towards the movies and Dick Slagle’s suitcases, Salinger suggests that Holden dislikes happy endings because of his brother’s death.

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The book The Catcher in the Rye is a story of internal conflicts and the shallowness of adulthood. The main character, Holden, is struggling to maintain his strong voice of innocence in a fight only involving himself. One of the many reasons for Holden’s emotional devastation is the death of his younger brother Allie. Allie passed away three years earlier from leukemia and this of course highly affected Holden’s mental state at the time even if he didn’t know it. Salinger’s tone held the most importance of this book.

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In the novel The Cather In The Rye, J.D Salinger implies that Holden a troubled adolescent can’t seem to find his place in society due to the loss of his brother Allie. Losing Allie made Holden give up on school, caused him to pick up unhealthy habits like smoking, and led him to be upset at the world. Since the death of Allie, Holden began to see the world as hopeless and corrupt. Salinger develops this idea from a first person point of view. With the use of diction, J.D Salinger is able to portray Holden Caulfield as a troubled teen who is facing tribulations after the death of his brother.

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Grief is something that most humans may encounter sometime in their lives however contrary to general consensus, grieving is not a short process. In fact on average the grieving process takes 5-8 years. According to Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross there are 5 phases of the grieving process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. This process is extremely relevant with the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caufield, since Holden’s younger brother Allie’s died 6 years before the start of the novel therefore leaving Holden in said grieving process. Holden bounces in between the phases, specifically anger, bargaining and depression.

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In chapter five of The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, the reader learns about the death of Allie, Holden’s younger brother. Holden and Allie were very close, and his death left a mark on Holden both mentally, and emotionally. It is inferred that Holden feels Allie did not deserve to die. “You’d have liked him. He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent.”

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At one point, everyone has lost a loved one in their life. Grief over a loved one’s death can significantly impact another’s life, as their reaction to the death may vary. In the novel, The Catcher In the Rye by J.D Salinger, Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of the story, deals with the unresolved grief of the death of his younger brother Allie. The death of his brother continues to torment him and impact his decisions. The most opposing challenge for the protagonist Holden Caulfield would be the unresolved grief he has for his brother..

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In J.D. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye, the tragic events in Holden’s life and his loss of innocence has led him to become a victim. To begin with, Holden has lost many people throughout his life. When Holden’s brother died he had a mental breakdown:“I was only thirteen, and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage”(Salinger 50). Holden was going through a formative period in his life where any Negative experience, let alone the death of a close family member, could affect him greatly;

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After talking about his childhood memories with his brother he states, ¨He is dead now. He got leukemia and died when we were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You´d have like him.¨ Then after talking about Allie’s old baseball mitt he said, ¨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¨(43-44). Allie’s death is used to show the unexpected change that Holden had experienced during his life. Allie was only eleven when he died, and Holden was thirteen.

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Life is a carousel, always going forward, never going back. In the poem, Circle of Life, Carly Nasch expresses this theme through the speaker being someone wise who understands this life lesson. The speaker really wants someone else to understand this lesson as well. Nasch emphasizes the theme that life doesn't stop for your mistake and you need to keep going no matter what through the metaphor of the carousel, repetition, and using rhetorical questions/giving commands. Nasch establishes the important metaphor of comparing life to a carousel right away.

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The Catcher in the Rye, written by J.D. Salinger in 1951, is the story of an angst-ridden sixteen year old Holden Caulfield as he learns to deal with growing up. The story follows Holden through his three day experience through New York as he learns about the truth about innocence, sex, and mortality, making The Catcher in the Rye one of America’s most notable coming-of-age stories. One of the largest influences on Holden’s life was his younger brother Allie who died from leukemia at age eleven when Holden was thirteen. The death of Holden’s brother had a profound effect on Holden emotional state, which eventually caused his complete mental breakdown by the end of the novel.

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3R Journal - Allie’s Death In the novel “The Catcher in the Rye”, readers are introduced to Holden’s brother, Allie, who met a tragic death on July 18, 1946. Allie died at the early age of eleven in the Caulfields' summer home as a result of leukemia - a cancer of blood cells. The night of his death, Holden was overpowered by grief and rage. He broke every window in the garage with this right hand, causing him to hospitalized.

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Throughout the book, Holden is struggling to get by. The death of his brother Allie has left him in a tough spot. Holden doesn’t exactly know how to deal with this. The different stages of grief are represented through Holden. Holden shows denial and anger when he flashbacks to one of his memories after his brother’s death.

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Throughout the novel, the topic of death is reoccurring in Holden 's mind. Whether he 's in school, doing homework, or aimlessly walking around New York City, Allie 's presence or lack thereof is always looming. It escalates to the point that Holden is always thinking about his own death, but more more specifically he 's fear of being forgotten: "Every time I came to the end of a block and stepped off the goddamn curb, I had this feeling that I 'd never get to the other side of the street. I thought I 'd just go down, down, down and nobody 'd ever see me again. Boy did it scare me"(256).

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Holden has so many courteous words to describe Allie. The impact of losing his brother seems to be very difficult for Holden. Salinger uses Allie’s death to show that cancer, primarily pediatric cancer, has a huge effect on the child’s family. Holden continues on stating that when he was thirteen “...they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don’t blame them.

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