I could start by presenting a summary of the plot but this has already been done in almost all of my classmates' entries, and what I’m really interested in is in Holden’s behavior and what is behind him.
Regarding his behavior, many book reviewers have claimed that Caulfield is a whiny, hypocrite and hateful character. Well, here is where I disagree since Holden is just an adolescence, who has lost a brother and who presents some symptoms of a mental illness. We can’t judge Holden just because he acts different from his peers. For this reason is that I want to analyze some important concepts and events presented in the book regarding Holden in order to understand him.
Concerning the stage of adolescence that he is passing through, he shows the typical behavior: he hates adults, he moves away everyone that approaches him but then he realized that he still need that person, he is afraid of growing up and he wants independency but he is not so sure about it. For this reason, is that this book is considered to make an entire generation feel identified with it: it portrays the feelings and the situations that adolescents pass. Moreover, when I read it I immediately remember the book The Unbearable lightness of being by Milan Kundera, where it is stated that:
Meaning that, when we are passing a difficult time, we go back to our childhood, to our happy and peaceful moments and we wish to just stay there. When Holden felt depressed or lonely he remembered the old times whit his brother and for that reason he may not want to grow up. Indeed, he said that:
“The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move.”
Moving on to his mental illness, this is not explicitly mentioned in the text but in many occasions he has been asked to visit a psychoanalyst or he has considered himself as a depressive person.
“ I was only thirteen, and they were going to have me psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I don't blame them. I really don't. 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. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn't do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it, and you didn't know Allie.”
With this passage we can infer that the mental breakdown he suffers at the end of the book is related to the death of his brother. Having in mind that he is not mentally stable, how we can judge him? How we ask Holden to be mature and without contradictions?
As it can be noted, Holden is mainly defined as a character full of contradictions. But aren’t we all just like Holden?
If we look at our society, we can realize that there are many Holden out there or many contradictions that all of us make. Few days ago, there was a case in which two men killed a criminal who was trying to steal their car. It was a new “detención ciudadana” but ending with a dead men. Some said it was the right thing to do if someone steals something of yours or if someone is breaking into your house, you have to take justice into your own hands. So… where is the contradiction? If we asked the same people that is in favor of this “detención ciudadana” what she/he thinks about abortion, they probably mention that it is agains the law and their beliefs, that is a human being that deserves to live. I know that the situations are different and that the criminal was making something against the law, but why do we perceive differently the lives of a criminal and a fetus? Is one of them more important than the other? Why the criminal deserves to die?
We are full of contradictions; our society is full of them. The difference is that we are not adolescents; we are adults.
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ResponderEliminarI'm really surprise of the fact that I disagree with you in some points, for example, when you say that he is not mentally stable for breaking all the windows when his brother passed away... I believed that this is one of the most comprehensible actions that he could have had. How do you deal with the death of someone you love? The majority of people would think of breaking everything that around them, but they contain their feelings. I think that this is the problem with Holden. He does not like to be a fake person like the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is always lying, saying things that they don't truly believe just to please someone or for their own benefit. I don't believe that Holden had had a mental illness apart from his Peter Pan syndrome, the rest I would associated with his stage of adolescence and his immaturity.
ResponderEliminarJust as you say at the end, "aren’t we all just like Holden?" The only problem is that we are adults no adolescents anymore, this allows us to think this way, but at the same time we don't see it as if there was something wrong with it.