Catcher in the Rye

The Catcher In The Rye

Positive human interactions and relationships are a necessary part of a meaningful and healthy life, without them life can seem empty, fearful, and unfulfilling. For most of us the ability or the basis to experience these interactions, is learned in childhood by the relationships we have with our parents. When parents are nurturing and supportive of us, we as children develop the ability to trust, thus enabling us to form future healthy relationships. Unfortunately for some, the interactions with their parents do not provide them with the trust and support that is needed to form healthy adult relationships. In The Catcher In The Rye the main character, Holden Caulfield, is an example of an individual who had suffered the lack of support and nurturance from his parents, and displays the unfortunate effects this has on his ability to form healthy relationships with others. Throughout the novel, Holden displays continuous cries for help, which are left unanswered by his parents, thus playing into to his inability to create lasting social interactions. The lack and loss of this interaction with his parents made it difficult for Holden to effectively cope with the loss of his brother and thus made the fear of loss a primary theme that affected his later relationships. In the novel, The Catcher in the Rye, Holden's inability to keep or form new relationships is ignited by his parent's lack of responsiveness to his cries for help during and after the loss of his brother, which greatly impacts his future adolescent relationships.

The novel, The Catcher In The Rye, is centered around the three-day journey of Holden Caulfield, a 16 -year-old prep school dropout, who throughout the novel reflects and narrates on his three-day adventure, as well as his traumatic life experiences. In the course of the novel, Holden displays frequent signs of depression and alienation, which were likely triggered by the death of his brother Allie. Both during and years after his brother's death, Holden displays continuous cries for help, directed towards his parents. An example of this is when Holden, angered and traumatized by his brother's death, reacts by breaking all the windows in his parent's garage. " I slept in the garage the night he died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist. "(Salinger, pg39) This quote displays the beginning of Holden's desperate struggle for his parent's support and love, which was instantly ignited by his brother's death, in the hope of a new but comforting and familiar relationship. In the novel Holden displayed an understandable and somewhat healthy reaction to his brothers death, which allows him to express his feelings of anger at the loss of his beloved brother. His parents interpret this action as sign of mental illness and think to refer him to psychoanalysis. "I was only thirteen,