Catcher In The Rye Adult Analysis

Does smoking, drinking, having sexual thoughts and living on your own make you an adult? Depending on one’s interpretation of J.D Salinger’s realistic novel, the Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield’s behavior can perceived one of two ways: as being more of a child or being more of an adult. Going through Holden’s 3 day escapade, he encounters various situations that challenges the reader to examine his maturity. Most of Holden’s actions displays a variety of child-like behavior. For one thing, Holden tries to grow up to much when in reality he doesn’t even understand what he is doing. At the same time, he just does things to make himself feel older. Holden shows himself in many ways throughout the book to be hypocritical and that is a child like attribute.

One reason that Holden is more of a child than an adult is that he tries to hard to grow up and is ignorant and just does things without knowing what's going on. Holden is only 16 and he already drinks and smokes like a 30 year old man. He even smoked and tried to drink with a mother of a kid that went to school with him, “ ‘Would you care for a cocktail?’ I asked her. I was feeling in the mood

Holden basically is very immature for what he did and he kind of deserved it. In the book it shows him getting beat up, “I didn't let go, though. I had a pretty good half nelson on him. ‘Liberate yourself from my viselike grip," I said. ‘Jesus Christ’. He put down his razor, and all of a sudden jerked his arms up and sort of broke my hold on him.” (pg 39) Holden is really a hypocrite also from the research paper, “This establishes Holden’s own sense of hypocrisy: although he condemns the behavior of the class to which he belongs, he shares their behaviors and even accepts this value system as reasonable.” (pg