Catcher In The Rye Holden

Catcher In The Rye: Holden’s Insight About Life And The World Around Him Essay, Research Paper

Catcher in the Rye: Holden’s Insight About Life and The World Around Him

The book Catcher in the Rye tells of Holden Caulfield’s insight about life

and the world around him. Holden shares many of his opinions about people and

leads the reader on a 5 day visit into his mind. Holden, throughout the book,

made other people feel inferior to his own. I can relate to this because

although I do not view people inferior to myself, I do judge others unequally.

Holden and I both have similar judgements of people from the way they act and

behave. We also share feelings about motivation as well as lack of it. After

reading this book, I came to the conclusion that Holden and I are much more

similar than I initially believed.

Holden portrayed others to be inferior to his own kind all throughout

the book. He made several references as to how people aren’t as perfect as he

was. “The reason he [Stradlater] fixed himself up to look good was because he

was madly in love with himself.” (pg. 27) Holden had an inferiority complex.

He was afraid of not having any special talents or abilities and used other

methods to make him out to be a rough tough boy. “Boy, I sat at that goddam bar

till around one o’clock or so, getting drunk as a bastard. I could hardly see

straight.” (pg. 150) Holden tried all he could to fit in. He drank, cursed and

criticized life in general to make it seem he was very knowing of these habits.

I myself have found me doing this at times, also. I, at times, feel the need to

fit in to a group and do things similar to what others do in order to gain

acceptance by them. I smoked a cigar once with two friends of mine because they

kept going on and on about how great cigars were, but that was only once.

Holden and I both place people on levels other than our own for amount of

knowledge and likeness to ourselves.

Holden used the term ‘phonies’ to describe more than a few people in

this book. He used the term to be what a person is if they don’t act naturally

and follow other people’s manners and grace. Holden didn’t like phonies, he

thought of them as if they were trying to show off. He didn’t like it when they

showed off because it seemed so fake and unnatural every time they would do so.

“At the end of the first act we went out with all

the other jerks for a cigarette. What a deal that

was. You never saw so many phonies in all your life,

everybody smoking their ears off and talking about