Essay On Catcher In The Rye And PTSD

The protagonist, Gale Murray is a school going young boy who was forced to come out of the home without informing anyone in the family due to his father’s harsh treatment. The boy seeks help from Catherine, who voluntarily offers him without asking any questions. She acts as the protector of the boy and makes necessary arrangements to get himself relived from the inner struggle. On the other hand, she understands the spiritual and emotional oneness with Gale’s

The protagonist Holden Caulfield is liberated from his warped personality and finally begins to realize his aversion of the grown-up life that change is inevitable and always accompanied by a sense of loss. Not accepting the changes in the surroundings and his actions makes him immature and not a trusted narrator. Avoiding issues by not facing them in the first place makes him being followed by disappointment constantly. For instance, in the beginning of the book Caulfield mentions his own opinion on leaving places and we know that when he was thirteen years old his little brother died. Instead of repairing the wounds and flesh he moves on like nothing happened the entire book until we find him in the psychiatric hospital as an entire breakdown.

J.D Salinger, in the novel The Catcher in the Rye demonstrates how Holden is affected by the tragic death of his brother Allie. Allie’s death is the root of Holden’s depression and negative choices. The first literary device J.D Salinger utilizes is Holden Caulfield's character. Allie's death at a young age may have resulted in Holden not wanting to grow up himself. This is shown through Holden's continuous expulsions from numerous schools.

It is known that Salinger “... wasn’t much of a student. After flunking out of the McBurney School near his home… he was shipped off by his parents to Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania (“J.D.,” Biography). Caulfield narrates that “... they [Pencey Prep] kicked me out… I was flunking four subjects and not applying myself and all” (Salinger 4). Additionally, Holden and Salinger both live or want to live a secluded lifestyle. For example, in the novel Holden regularly fantasizes about a solitary life and in this life he would be a self-sufficient deaf mute (Rollins 382).

However, Jake Barnes could never achieve and participate in this craze due to the injury he sustained during WWI. This damaged his self-esteem and due to the location of the injury, his masculinity, “Undressing, I looked at myself in the mirror...of all the ways to be wounded” (Hemingway 38). Maslow's hierarchy of needs states that one must achieve self-esteem before self-actualization. Therefore, “Jake will never achieve the psychological stability he craves because he finally accepts...philosophies about his injury...these ideas...will always leave him vulnerable to the fear that he will...be an invalid” (Fore). Not only does this ruin his self-esteem but ruins his relationships as well since he is impotent as a result.

Unfortunately, the ones suffering are not just the people at war, it is also their families. They go through the same bloody path as their loved ones. Every survivor is getting haunted by the burden of killing. In a short story “Stop the Sun,” by Gary Paulsen, a thirteen-year old boy named Terry, whose father has a psychological disorder known as the Vietnam Syndrome, wants to know why his father acts in such a weird way. Throughout the story, Terry understands that words can not show experiences; furthermore, he learns to accept people even if they have disorders.

The notion of Caulfield’s desire to live as a “poor deaf-mute bastard”(Salinger 1994:179) where “they’d leave me alone”(Salinger 1994: 179) is a prime example of Caulfield’s wish to become detached and alienated from those around him. Through alienation and detachment from those around him, he avoids confrontation and interaction with people which he believes will be the saviour of his own self falling victim to phoniness. However, as Caulfield acts quickly to criticize and label others as, “that was the phoniest bastard I ever met in my life” (Salinger 1994:12), he does not realise that he is actually guilty of the phoniness that he so easily labels others with. Holden Caulfield exhibits a clear dislike for the idea of change, where he shows visible signs of fear towards this idea, “Certain things they should stay the way they are” (Salinger 1994:110). Caulfield finds safety and security in The Museum of Natural History, “I loved that damn museum” (Salinger 1994:108) as it an example of the ideal stagnant and predictable world that Caulfield longs for, “The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was” (Salinger 1994: 109).

Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the rye, the protagonist and narrator Holden Caulfield is a sixteen-year-old boy who has just been kicked out of school, Pency Prep, for failing four subjects and not applying himself (Salinger, 1994: 3). The story is told over three day period as Holden wonders the streets New York avoiding going home to tell his parents he has been kicked out of school. He later visits his old teacher, Mr Spencer, who tries to get him in order to no avail. His rebellious spirit leads him to wander alone in New York. Holden is a personification of Camus definition of a rebel; he turning around his hunting hat is a symbolical gesture of refusal to submit to societal values and norms.

Before he vanishes from the text, he has given up making any impact on the world or lives around him: “Decisions are never really made—at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all-round assholery. […] It does annoy him that he can be so divided, so perfectly unable to come down on one side or another” (GR 802). Since he does not support any side, Slothrop is described as one of “the glozing neuters of the world” (GR 802). Historically, for Puritans neuters are people “that halt betweene two opinions […] the Lord abhorres such lukewarme tame fooles” (Hooker qtd. in Miller 58), and whose “‘[d]eadness of heart’ was the most insupportable curse” (Miller 58).

I believed that Hamlet’s madness and revenge actions are justified because he was facing several very difficult situations, in a brief time. I think the best way to understand Hamlet’s actions is imagining being in his shoes. For a moment, visualize that your father dies suddenly without giving you time to say goodbye or to prepare you for the emptiness that his departure is going to leave in you. In addition, your uncle married your mother, two months after your father’s funeral. Those two situations are strong enough to destabilize any person.

“sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all of the lives I’m not living.” (pg. 113) Thomas is depressed. He lost his loved ones in a bombing, and he’s the only one that survived. It causes him a lot of pain and suffering. “It’s a rule that we never listen to sad music, we made that rule early on, songs are as sad as the listener, we hardly ever listen to music.”

The author Cormac McCarthy just seemed to give us an abundance of tragedy and violence as the father of the boy keeps trying to tell him that they’ll make it even though everything seemed to be bleak. Anybody who used to be anybody was no longer important anymore, no matter what your occupation used to be in the old world. This newer world seems to be extremely backwards and even one of my favorite quotes in the book proves it, “You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.” It shows that nothing in the old world matters since all you can seem to remember are the dreadful things in order for you to know that in this time and age the situation are dangerous, which makes you push yourself in order to survive. Since their new world was post- apocalyptic, there is no more relying on law enforcement agencies or in humanity either. When things begin to get rough, people take to extreme measures to make sure they can survive even if it means turning to cannibalism to stay alive.