霍尔顿形象分析

CONTENTSI. Introduction (1)II. Holden‟s Refusal of Growing up (3)A. the Phony World in Holden‟s Eyes (3)B. Holden‟s Struggle between Childhood and Adulthood (4)C. His Escaping from the Reality (6)III. the Ca uses of Holden‟ Refusal to Grow up (6)A. The Modernization of American Society……………………6.B. his Isolation from Society (7)IV. Conclusion (8)An Analysis of Holden‟s Character in The Catcher in the RyeAbstract: This paper analyses the personality of the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, who is a controversial character. In this paper, the author analyses the personality of Holden Caulfield from two aspects: ⑴Holden Caulfield is a sincere person, what he search for is trueness or innocence, and what he detests most is hypocrisy.⑵Holden refuses to grow up. Besides, this article will briefly try to find some causes of his personality.Key Words: innocent, lost, escapement内容提要本文主要对《麦田里的守望者》一书中的主人公霍尔顿•考尔菲德这一人物性格进行分析。

这是一个颇具争议的人物。

本文将从两方面分析阐述霍尔顿•考尔菲德的性格：一是霍尔顿•考尔菲德他本人的正直和他对真实的追求和对虚伪的厌恶。

二是霍尔顿•考尔菲德拒绝成长。

另外，本文还将大致探索造成霍尔顿•考尔菲德这种性格的成因。

关键词：天真，迷失，逃避I. IntroductionThe catcher in the rye is the written by J. D. Salinger. J. D. Salinger becomes one of the most prominent Post-World ii American novelists, after it was published in 1951. The novel immediately becomes very popular in America soon after its publication and has been reprinted again and again. From time to time, Salinger is quite popular to audience of students, students‟ intellectuals, instructors, and generally literary, sensitive, and sophisticated young people who respond to him with a consciousness that he speaks for them and virtually to them, in a language that is peculiarly honest and their own, with a vision of things that captures their most secret judgments of the world.The catcher in the rye narrates a series of picaresque adventures of a sixteen-year-old boy in the New York for three days. It belongs to the American initiation story and has a very important status in the literature. American initiation story is a novel genre, which attaches great importance to growing up problems of the adolescence, but has its own features in terms of narrative structure, plot and protagonists. The protagonist Holden Caulfield became a quite legendary character, and his awareness of adolescent is just like the most sensitivity young Americans.Since its publication, the catcher in the rye is a controversial literary work. Some very famous literary critics including John Aldridge, Maxwell Geismar, Leslie Fiedler, Grederick Gwymn even doubted at the value of the catcher in the rye. This situation lasts until Warren French publishes his first work on Salinger: J. D. Salinger. Additional critics of the catcher in the rye concentrated on the language, narrative structure, and cultural continuity compared with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the education or initiation of an adolescent, and Holden‟s awareness crisis.And this paper will analyze the character of Holden in the catcher in the rye. And the reasons why his character is like this. After Post-World War, more and more young people faced on the main-adolescence growing up crisis in the America. During adolescence, boys and girls go through the biological, psychological, and social changes necessary to prepare themselves to meet the challenges of becoming adults. Someone explains it more exactly, “adolescence is a process of achieving the attitudes and beliefs needed for effective participation in society.” But, they didn‟t suit the changes from young to the marital adult. Holden is such kind of adolescent; he fails in school uses vulgar expressions, gets drunk…He may be thought to have some vulgar or not very high moral standards. These common characteristics of teenagers may not match the idealistic conception of adolescents. On one hand, Holden finds the innocence of children and wants to be a protector of the innocence; on the other hand, he must be growing up and gets into the dilemma between the childhood and the adulthood. He refuses the traditions of school in which they justfocus on educating people materialistically, but lacking depth. His loneliness and rebellion result from his conscious refusing of the false conventions and phonies that surround him. However, no matter hoe repellent Holden is, he is not to overthrow society. So at the end of the novel, the red hunting hat can‟t stop the pouring rain; Holden has the wet clothes. Holden must be inevitably going back under the help of Phoebe.II. Holden’s Refusal of Growing up.A. The Phony World in Holden’s EyesAdolescents are in marginal situation; it is, we may say so, a special period of human development, a fascinating transitional period. Undoubtedly, adolescence undergoes many changes and bears much responsibility for their further development into adult world. But adolescence didn‟t suit the changes quite well. Holden is in such a situation. He finds that the surroundings are a phony world. He can not understand the world and wants to preserve the innocence childhood. And then the sensitive adolescent is trapped in the dilemma between phony adulthood and the pure childhood, as well as between his inner innocence and the outside experience.In this novel, we can easily find that one of the most frequently used words in Holden‟s remarks is “phony”. The schools are phony, the sponsors are phony, teachers are phony, and so are the students phony. “Phony” is a slang, which means unreal, pretended and not genuine. From this frequently used word “phony”, it can not be difficult to find out that Holden keeps detecting lousy motives in the people. (Rui, 120)At the beginning of the story, Holden was separated himself from others, sitting on the top of a hill cold like hell. He was flunked out of Pencey. This is his fourth time. Because he failed four out five of his classes so he received notice that he will be expelled soon. The other reason for Holden‟s escaping probably is that h can not understand the people of the school. In adult eyes, Pencey is a school, which has “avery good academic rating,” (Salinger, 8) but Holden treats it as “full of crooks”, and “quite a few guys came from these very wealthy families, but it was full of crooks anyway. Pencey is an expensive school, but there are also thieves. The more expensive a school is, the more crooks it has.”(Salinger, 8) Even “Old Thurmer”interrupts his class to “crack a lot of crony jokes”. Spencer would “practically kill himself chunking and smiling”. (Salinger 168)And in chapter 22, Holden sneaks back home and has a long talk with his sister Phoebe. Knowing that Holden is really expelled from school, it is out of Phoebe‟s expectation, so she asks him to give a reason for why he quits his school. Holden says:Oh, God, Phoebe, don‟t ask me. I‟m sick of everybody asking me that. A million reasons why. It was one of the worse schools I ever went to. It was full of phonies. And mean guys. You never saw so many mean guys in your life. For instance, I don‟t ever feel like talking about it. It was a stinking school. (Salinger, 174)From the words of Holden, we can find that Holden is so disappointed at the schools which are workshops producing more and more “phonies”. The phony surroundings of school let him escaping from school to New York.But, what has happened to him in New York? If the world of Pency is “full of crooks”, then the world of New York is like the hell on the earth. Through the window, he looks at the scenes of perversion: a distinguished-looking guy wears women‟s coats, and a man and a woman squirt distortion water out of their mouths at each other. In night clubs and bars he hears only the creepy accents of shallow words. He says, “It‟s a place that is supposed to be a very sophisticated and all, and the phonies are coming in the window”. “If you sat around there long enough and heard all the phonies applauding and all, you got to hate everything in the world, I swear you did.”(Salinger, 148) moreover, the night clubs are full of all kinds of peopleincluding flits in the other end of the bar. Even the bartender was “a louse, too. He was a big snob. If you were a big shot or celebrity or something, then he was even more nauseating. He would go up to you and say, with his big charming smile, like he was a helluva swell guy.” (Salinger, 148)B. Holden’s Struggle between Childhood and AdulthoodAfter reading this novel, we can find another important factor in Holden‟s character, which is his own world of innocence, or a child‟s world. He does not want to get into the “phony” adult world. Actually, it is very natural. Because during the process of their growing up, teenagers always doubt and feel confused about the existing world order and the values, just like a fish out of water, which in fact is a totally understandable phenomenon. (Yu, 170) it is a period in which dissatisfaction can not be avoided when the teenagers discover that their idealized childhood values clash with real world. There is a sudden distance from the cherish ideals and beliefs of childhood to peculiar social reality of adulthood. Holden, at sixteen, is supposed to be ready to leave his innocence and move forward to the adult world. But he refuses to change, because those mature people are phony and foolish in his eyes. He struggles between the “dream of innocence and the fact of growing up”.Children are innocent and pure, while adult means mature, phony and secular. Holden desires the innocence of children, which is revealed in his affection toward his young sister, Phoebe. When Holden goes back home to see his sister Phoebe, she is sleeping with her face sort of on one side of the pillow. She has her mouth open. “It‟s cute,” Holden says. But “you check out adults, they look lousy when they are asleep and they have their mouths open, but kids don‟t look like that. Kids look pretty right. Kids can even have spit all over the pillow and they still look all right”. (Salinger, 166) In Holden‟s viewpoint, the children are much better than adults in almost every aspect. Children can not be affected by conformity, convention, and immorality. And children are sincere and innocence and, “childhood is the source of the good in human life; it is in that kind of state that human beings are genuine. Holden really hopes that peoplewould stay away from children for their whole lives, and that they would retain their honesty and naivety.Children are different from adults in many aspects. Children are naïve and pure. They have not yet learned the phoniness and pretense, while which are the adults‟common characters. To Holden, growing up means to enter the world where phony is everywhere. He is so reluctant to enter the adult world, for he can not find his role he likes. He yearns for pure childhood, and he does not want to be into adulthood. He rejects all practice that marks initiation into adulthood. So Holden finds various means to protect his adulthood from world‟s influences. He makes great effort to catch his innocence. As Holden himself says, “certain things they should stay the way they are”. (Salinger, 128)C. His Escaping from the RealityI keep picturing all these little kids playing some in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids and nobody‟s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I‟m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff—I mean if they‟re running and they don‟t look where they‟re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That‟s all I‟d do all day. I‟d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it is crazy, but that‟s the only thing I‟d really like to be. (Salinger, 179-180)From this monologue above, Holden is a constant character in the story, his attitude toward life results from his attitude toward himself. His low self-esteem causes him to try to run away from life and from reality. When life is presented to him as a game with r ules, he breaks the rules and leaves the game. He‟s a person who refuses to accept reality and tries as much as he can to grasp childhood. He always wants to protect children‟s purity and innocence. (Claro)Through out the novel, Holden incessantly mentions how things depress him. Everything from the way people act, to how things are in nature, brings him down. Holden‟s behavior revolves around his depression. He does not try to pass his classesin school, as well as he does not try to be overly social. He hates the way that people can be so phony, yet he himself can also be called one. Holden tries to put up a front to hide his depression. He acts the way that he thinks people want him to act. Holden enjoys …shooting the bull‟ with people. This is because i t is the only way that he can have a conversation with someone without revealing his depression. (Claro)III. Causes of Holden’ Refusal to Grow upA. The Modernization of American SocietyHolden‟s plight represents the plight of young people of his contemporary: they are neither under the sanctuary of the nature gods, nor guidelines from the elderly. He dreams of going to the west, living by the lake, asking her sister Phoebe to stay in his place in summer holidays, Christmas and Easter, if his brother D. B. is looking for a comfortable, quiet place to write, he can go to his place, too. In Holden‟s ideal dream of the west, there are full of nature, tranquility, comfort. But he ultimately was not able to escape from city. Holden‟s experience reflects that the modern western civilization spreads on a large scale. (Bing, 137)According to this novel we can see that Holden is faced with a criminal and inhuman world. His living condition is just like that of Hamlet, who is standing in front of a world about to collapse. He was deceived by the world of supremacy of material. The American society, in which Holden lives, is no longer like the society Thoreau or Adams live, because now it is a modern, complex, urbanized and alienated society. People are surrounded generally by the hypocrisy, indifference, impudence, and decadence. Through the eyes of Holden, Salinger presents not only the living context of the hero but also a scary, disgusting adult world. The basic features of the world are shameless hypocrisy, and this is Holden hates most. (Huang, 93)This novel is known for his autobiographical details that are transplanted into a post-World War II setting. This novel reflects American adults‟lack of enthusiasmfor helping and guiding the adolescents. Thus, this kind of society causes mental anxiety and distress to teenagers. (Yang, 551)Under the influence of the War, American people have changed not only in their looking but also in mind. Though they are rich in material life, they become spiritually empty and , what‟s worse, they are psychologically unbalanced. They have also lot their values of moral standard. This is the environment or background in which Holden lives. (Fu)B. His Isolation from SocietyHolden‟s isolation is as a form of self-protection and not wanting people to know the real of him. I am pretty sure that Holden‟s alienation is the cause of his most unhappiness. He never seems to address his own emotions, nor does he attempt to discover the reasons for his own troubles. He greatly needs contact and love with other humans, but his protective wall of bitterness keeps from seeking that. For example, his loneliness makes him to have a dire to date Sally Hayes, but his wanting for isolation leads him to drive her away.Holden explains, “The be st thing, though, in the museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody‟d move…Nobody‟d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.” Holden also mention he wishes he could live in: “the catcher in the rye” fantas y, a world where nothing ever changes, where things are simple and understanding. Holden‟s character hates challenges and conflict. He fears interaction with people around him. (Salinger)He deplored that he has lost his childhood, at the same time he refused to be a role of the adult world; this is the typical Holden code confusion and pain. But he has been unable to return to Childhood, while fears of entering a false hypocritical adult world. He lost between the two worlds. Moreover, disturbing for him, he realized that he had been tarnished by adult world. Therefore, in order to prevent these simple andpure children from repeating his tragedy, he is willing to stand on the edge as a catcher. (Huang, 100-101)IV. ConclusionThe analysis above reveals that Holden represents the lonely and lost American youth. He is at odds with the adult society, and he refuses to grow up because he thinks that the adult world is phony. He treasures innocent childhood, so Holden wants to be the catcher in the rye. In a word, this resulted from the American post-war influence and his intended isolation.Works Cited[1] Claro, Joseph. J. D. Salinger‟s the Catcher in the Rye. 2005. Dec. 28, 2010 </765826_d.html>[2] Fu, Xinmei. “Holden Caufield: A Problem Boy in the Catcher in the Rye.” JiaoyuYuandi 5-6(2004):192-193.[3] Huang, Tiechi. 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