A journey back home, a journey back to sanity

Once upon a time, there was this young boy who had been kicked out of school, again. He felt the right to judge everyone around him, but his teenage reasoning didn’t let him see that HE was the real problem until it was too late to do something to prevent what was going to happen to him.

That could sum up my vision of The Catcher in the Rye, I won’t say I completely disliked it, but I won’t say it was my favorite novel either. As the aunt of a 15 year old boy, I felt like I was reading my nephew’s thoughts; so it was hard to connect with the protagonist, or at least with one of the protagonist’s version. This duality in Holden is what caught my attention.

From the very beginning of the novel, I realized the kid had a problem because, at times, it felt as if Holden was bipolar, and maybe he was (that’s how things ended up the way they did, imagining that he ended up in this rehab center for people with mental disorders). For instance, he would say his roommates were phony people highlighting all their defects instead of their virtues, and the next time he would be asking for asylum to one of them (so deep inside he must have liked them).

Being back home, in New York,  the contradictions kept occurring.  In a moment he was feeling amused by a girl’s physical beauty and the next one he was telling her that she was a pain in the ass; all the time, he would suggest all that he didn’t like superficial people, but then he would say that he immediately hated people that had cheap suitcases; that he hated movies, but he talked a lot about them and he went to the movies regularly.

In my opinion, Holden is full of self hatred. He projects his own defects in the people around them and hates them for it.  Although, at times yes, he was fully conscious that he was lying and he enjoyed it. And for me as a reader, those moments where the ones when I made some sort of connection with the character, because as adults we lie sometimes to get along with a situation (as he did when he lied to the elevator boy to get into their parents apartment) or we lie to avoid making others feel miserable (as he did when talking to Ernest Morrow’s mom). But, as the teenager, Holden was most of the things he hated and most of what he did was done without much previous thinking.

Finally, if there is some sanity in Holden, it lies in the part of him narrating the story. That part of Holden is easier to connect with, because he’s the one that realizes that things in the world are not O.K, the catcher, the good boy behind the mask; he is a sensitive character whose life has been ripped apart by the death of his beloved brother, he realizes that the innocence of children is all the world had left, He enjoys simple things, like spending time with Phoebe (his little sister, a very wise child) , but unfortunately he was kind of blurred, almost ghostly. This Holden desperately tries to fix everything that the other one has screwed up. And unfortunately he is more evident at the end of the novel after he sneaked into their parent’s apartment to see his little sister. During his journey we can see dualities not only in Holden himself, but also in the world surrounding him.

I realized that some social issues that are currently part of our day-to-day life were also part of Holden’s. Firstly,  the whole hipster trend that Holden saw in the Ivy-league college students, who were supposed to be smart, but in the end they were superficial and not very reflective people; however, since they belonged to this selected group, people assumed they were deep thinkers. Nowadays, people adopt this trend and they feel quite unique compared to others, whether this is true or not.

Secondly, bullying and the effects it has on the ones that suffer it. In this sense, we have the very descriptive event that took place at Elkton Hills when James Castle decided that it was better to die than to face the bullies. This happens a lot in reality but we don’t do much about it until it’s too late.

 Another thing that caught my attention was this event with Sunny, the prostitute; Holden mentioned she was about his age, so we can assume it was a case of child prostitution. And although we know this is a reality in Chile, we don’t talk about it, we choose to turn a blind eye on, and by doing this we’re all allowing it to keep occurring. At least I was glad it was mentioned in the novel so that generations that read it, for a moment will think about this.

Going back to Holden the last part of his journey is finally getting home, and home for him is Phoebe. She’s a clever, innocent, wise, perceptive girl. And Holden went back to sanity and stopped all his crazy thoughts so that he could stay with her and not disappoint her the way everything had disappointed him in the past.

A whole trip that showed a glimpse of what the America really is, a place of contradictions. A whole trip through a fake country of fake dreams through a fake character whose transition from insanity to a sort of sanity was arranged in a series of depressing events.