Holden’s Life Lessons

My favorite part of The Catcher in the Rye is how Salinger manages to deal with deep, difficult to discuss/articulate ideas and fears, while maintaining an “easy to read” connectivity to the narrator (Holden) and without bluntly throwing ideas out to the reader. We have to stare deep into Holden’s snippets of narrated past while trying to understand how they shape and impact his present day state of mental “falling”.   Holden is deeply dissatisfied with society and how he fits (/fails to fit) into any part of society.  His ideals and “purity” from childhood are constantly trounced on by the “phonies” of the world and cannot seem to figure out how to fit into a phony society.   

Holden, like all of us, struggles with understanding/dealing with changes to any part of his life (just imagining the museum scene where he finds reassurance in the stability of the contents inside the glass boxes).  Even after Pencey and the very end of the novel he has nostalgia for Stradlater and Ackley and all of their “phoniness”.   The hardest part of transience for Holden, and most humans, is death, and trying to grapple with/comprehend how our life can move forward without our loved ones, and how everything we have ever known can come to a close.  Although Holden doesn’t explicitly discuss many of his own grief/worries/problems, it is evident in his narration, depression, and pieces of “ideal past” described that demonstrate his struggles with dealing with Allie’s death, and the change of people/society around him.

Most of my favorite scenes in The Cather in the Rye are towards (/at) the end of the novel when Holden talks to and hangs out with Phoebe.  For me, no matter all the “phonies” and messed up terrible things that plague the past and present state of the human race, the most special, beautiful part of life is our connectivity and love and positive energy that passes through loved ones.  Throughout the entire novel, Holden lacks a good friend who he can talk to about these deep feelings and “falling” he is going through, and Phoebe IS that friend who really picks him up and gives him love back into his life.   

Personal Rambling Reflections on Stephen’s Self-focused Superiority

           Throughout all of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, one of our class’s big frustrations/critiques of Stephen Dedalus as a character is how incredibly self-centered he appears from the very beginning to the ending of the novel.  In the first four sections of the book we hardly view any of his interactions with other people and Stephen seems to lack any friends or people he trusts.  The reader never gets any narration of Stephen discussing his personal thoughts or emotions with anyone until chapter five.  Stephen’s world is very self-centered in that everything that comes into it he takes as if it were solely for him, despite being surrounded by classmates and family for the majority of the novel. During the retreat, Stephen feels that every word out of the priest’s mouth is directly for himself, and never even thinks about what the other people in the room are feeling.  For me, the pinnacle of Stephen’s inward focus is in his relationship to God:  in the beginning of the Stephen feels that every single thing he does has a direct response from God.  We see how personal a relationship Stephen takes with God and how he feels like he can only be “super devote” or “super rebellious” in both cases seeming “above” all of his peers and humans on earth. 

            Yet, even if Stephen’s case may be a bit on the extreme side, I believe that to some extent this is how every human views their world at some points in their life.  Personally, I had a lot of similar perspectives when I was very young in so far that I genuinely believed that EVERYTHING I did was being watched by God or some higher-power that I had a direct relationship with. The important difference, however, is that as I got older I actually talked with other humans that made me realize I am not the center of the universe – Stephen begins to start talking to other people during his college days, but even then it feels like 99.99% of his focus is on himself.  Other people sort of follow him, but he does not seem to give any of that back.  He has “friends” but I don’t think he really *cares* about them the way they might care back. 

Naturally speaking, it makes sense for humans to be self-centered in that our reality literally is centered around ourselves.   Everything that comes into our reality we view in relation to ourselves and how it impacts us – often if it does not impact us then we are likely to pay attention to it.  For instance, let’s just think about evolution and a thousands-of-yeas-ago human living in a cave ***SORRY THIS IS SORTA WEIRD***. Everything is about survival.  Old-human’s reality is full of things coming in and out, but it is most important for old-human to not die.  Let’s take for instance the literally reality of what is coming in through old-human’s senses:  Old-human is looking out of cave and sees grassy area, barren area, rocky area, and forested area.  Old-human would view each one of these in relation to how they might benefit old-human’s survival.  Old-human would not care about the areas that do not relate to his survival – old-human would think naturally about which areas would lead to plants, animals, or tools and how they would help with their own survival.  Old-human would not give much thought to the barren area.  Now imagine this old-human to be Stephen Dedalus sitting in church with all of his peers and the preacher yelling over them about the fires of hell – Stephen does NOT think about the barren ground of his peers which he views as completely unimportant in his survival but is just focused on what societally has been prioritized in his consciousness which is his relationship with God which dictates his “survival” in various sense.   So in this sense a lot of Stephen’s self-focus has been naturally drilled into him by his religion.  YET (going back to the old-human) A CRITICAL PART OF THIS SURVIVAL IS ONE’S RELATIONSHIPS – Old-human needs to reproduce, protect children, etc for survival.  This young-Stephan COMPLETELY lacks, and older-Stephen MOSTLY lacks.  I think there definitely is improvement in Stephen’s relationships, but in my mind this is the aspect of his life in which he still has not “come-to-age” in: he chooses to leave ALL his relationships to pursue his artistry – something that Old-Human could never have done.  To me, this abandonment of his friends/family is still rooted in his self-centeredness specialness of how he prioritizes his art over his relationships, which he wasn’t too fond of in the first place.  I would say what is most “heroic” or most impactful personally for him is his abandoning his relationship with God as he leaves – God is the only “character” in the book that Stephen seems to from the beginning to communicate and care about his relationship with. This is the biggy in my mind in what he truly abandons/sacrifices to become “free” from everything and devote himself to his art.