Authentic versus Artificial

Innocence

As its title indicates, the dominating theme of The Catcher in the Rye is the protection of innocence, especially of children. For most of the book, Holden sees this as a primary virtue. It is very closely related to his struggle against growing up. Holden's enemy is the adult world and the cruelty and artificiality that it entails. The people he admires all represent or protect innocence. He thinks of Jane Gallagher, for example, not as a maturing young woman but as the girl with whom he used to play checkers. He goes out of his way to tell us that he and Jane had no sexual relationship. Quite sweetly, they usually just held hands. Holden comforted Jane when she was distressed, and it bothers him that Jane may have been subjected to sexual advances from her drunken stepfather or from her date, Holden's roommate, Stradlater.

Holden's secret goal is to be "the catcher in the rye." In this metaphor, he envisions a field of rye standing by a dangerous cliff. Children play in the field with joy and abandon. If they should come too close to the edge of the cliff, however, Holden is there to catch them. His attitude seems to shift near the end of the novel when he realizes that Phoebe and other children must be allowed to "grab for the gold ring," to choose their own risks and take them, even though their attempts may be dangerous.

Holden's aesthetics are entertaining, but they also tell us a good deal about his worldview. He sees much of life as a conflict between the authentic and the artificial, which is directly related to his attitude toward children and his resistance to the adult world. When Holden sees the 6-year-old child marching down the street singing, "If a body catch a body coming through the rye," he is uplifted because of the authenticity of the scene. The boy is not trying to please anyone; he is merely expressing his passion of the moment. D.B.'s short stories fall into the same category. They are quiet, private, an author's expression of his own truth without concern for reward. Estelle Fletcher, the black artist who sings "Little Shirley Beans" on the recording that Holden buys for Phoebe, is another adult who gets it right. Holden likes her jazz style, saying she "sings it very Dixieland and whorehouse, and it doesn't sound at all mushy." He appreciates the fact that she avoids sentimentality and doesn't cater to the audience by making the song "sound cute as hell."

On the other hand, when Ernie plays his piano at his nightclub in Greenwich Village, or when D.B. writes screenplays for Hollywood, or when various actors compromise their talents to please an audience, Holden can't stand it. These adult manipulations are, for him, the same as prostitution. The artists have sold out — for money or fame or just for applause. Nor can he tolerate what he sees as emotional manipulations in literature. Romance magazines with "lean-jawed guys named David" and "a lot of phony girls named Linda or Marcia" usually set Holden to "puking," although he does sometimes read them on the train. Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, which has a great reputation as an antiwar novel, also strikes him as manipulative and artificial. So do most films, especially sentimental war films. In the end, he seems to distrust the corrupting potential of the relationship between artist and audience, especially among adults.

The Phoniness of the Adult World

“Phoniness,” which is probably the most famous phrase from The Catcher in the Rye, is one of Holden's favorite concepts. It is his catch-all for describing the superficiality, hypocrisy, pretension, and shallowness that he encounters in the world around him. In Chapter 22, just before he reveals his fantasy of the catcher in the rye, Holden explains that adults are inevitably phonies, and, what's worse, they can't see their own phoniness. Phoniness, for Holden, stands as an emblem of everything that's wrong in the world around him and provides an excuse for him to withdraw into his cynical isolation.

Though oversimplified, Holden's observations are not entirely inaccurate. He can be a highly insightful narrator, and he is very aware of superficial behavior in those around him. Throughout the novel he encounters many characters who do seem affected, pretentious, or superficial—Sally Hayes, Carl Luce, Maurice and Sunny, and even Mr. Spencer stand out as examples. Some characters, like Maurice and Sunny, are genuinely harmful. But although Holden expends so much energy searching for phoniness in others, he never directly observes his own phoniness. His deceptions are generally pointless and cruel and he notes that he is a compulsive liar. For example, on the train to New York, he perpetrates a mean-spirited and needless prank on Mrs. Morrow. He'd like us to believe that he is a paragon of virtue in a world of phoniness, but that simply isn't the case. Although he'd like to believe that the world is a simple place, and that virtue and innocence rest on one side of the fence while superficiality and phoniness rest on the other, Holden is his own counterevidence. The world is not as simple as he'd like—and needs—it to be; even he cannot adhere to the same black-and-white standards with which he judges other people.

Major Symbols of The Catcher in the Rye

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11