Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a mental disorder in which one has trouble recovering after witnessing a terrifying event. People suffering from this particular disorder tend to play traumatizing flashbacks repeatedly in their minds as if the event reoccurs in front of them. In The Catcher In the Rye, Holden Caulfield bears the pain of PTSD from the death of his younger brother, Allie. Therefore, he desperately looks for people who might understand him, including taxi drivers, women in a bar, and his sister, Phoebe. In addition, he wants to explore the adult world. Throughout the book, Holden is caught in a limbo between the innocence of childhood and the complexity of adulthood. The death of his brother Allie leads a series of events that causes Holden’s PTSD and prompts his modeling of poor adult choices.
Holden’s initial reaction to Allie’s death indicates the beginning of his mental health decline. The night that Allie died of leukemia when the whole family is in Maine, Holden “broke all the goddam windows with [his] fist just for the hell of it” (Salinger 39). He even wants to break more windows, but his hands are too injured to continue. He admits this is a stupid action, but he “hardly didn’t even know [he] was doing it” (Salinger 39). Anyone with stable mental health would not choose to break glass windows with their bare hands. They all have some idea of the consequences to the actions they do before they actually perform the act. Holden’s act of breaking garage windows and the fact that he is not even aware of it until his hands are broken represent the abnormality in his mental health. When he is imagining his own funeral later in the chapter, he thinks about Allie’s funeral but “[he] wasn’t there. [He] was still in the hospital. [He] had to go to the hospital and all after I hurt my hand” (Salinger 155). Even though Holden says the reason why he cannot attend Allie’s funeral is because he was not allowed to leave from the hospital due to his his broken hands, there is something more to his health other than just his physical injuries. The fact that he broke all the garage windows with his bare hands already suggests that he has serious mental issue and might be required to stay in a psychiatric hospital
The reason why Allie’s death is so devastating to Holden is because he is an idealized figure in Holden’s heart. According to Holden, Allie is very intelligent but “it wasn’t just that he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at anybody” (Salinger 38). Holden comes from a wealthy family but he does not have a good relationship with his parents. Therefore, Allie is probably the one that he feels the closest to, because he is emotionally distant from his parents. His father seems to be preoccupied with his career and his mom is in a fragile physical condition after Allie’s death. She is constantly nervous and smokes cigarettes all the time. His older brother, D.B., is busy with his successful screenwriting career all the way in Hollywood. The geographical distance between Holden and D.B. make it so they hardly see each other. Therefore, Allie is probably the only person that Holden feels close with. In Holden’s mind, Allie is a glorified figure, and even though he has flaws like all other human beings, Holden chooses to shield all of Allie’s shortcomings and glorify his strength. What hurts people the most is when their most precious one is gone, and sometimes it is difficult for them to actually accept the loss. When Holden recalls that his parents frequently visit Allie’s grave when the weather is nice and they always put a lot of flowers on it, he “went out with them a couple of times, but (he) cut it out. In the place, [he] certainly don’t enjoy seeing him in this crazy cemetery. Surrounded by dead guys and tombstones and all” (Salinger 155). Holden cannot put himself in front of Allie’s grave because he can’t stand seeing him with all the other dead people in the cemetery. This shows that he has not truly accepted the fact that his younger brother is dead, even though it happened three years ago when he was thirteen.
The tragedy of losing someone important has the capability to crash a person’s innocence, hopes, and dreams, and Allie’s death leads to a series of poor performances and adult choices made by Holden. First, he has failed four out of the five classes at Pencey Preparatory School and is getting kicked out after the end of semester. Prior to attending this high school, he already has gotten expelled from two other schools. Before he leaves from Pencey, he gets into a fist fight Stradlater, his roommate, after his date with Jane, a girl that Holden has strong feelings to. When Stradlater refuses to reveal the details, Holden says, “All I know is I got up from the bed, like I was going down to the can or something, and then I tried to sock him, with all my might, right in the toothbrush, so it would split his goddam throat open” (Salinger 43). Holden’s act of hitting his roommate is a bad decision, because Stradlater punches him even harder and makes his nose bleed. It is way better for him to express his feeling towards Jane to Stradlater verbally instead of starting a physical fight with him.
Additionally, he holds curiosity towards the adult world, but he often make poor choices. When the elevator operator in the hotel offers a prostitute for five dollars, he accepts the offer and says, “It was against my principles and all, but I was feeling so depressed I didn’t even think. That’s the whole trouble. When you’re feeling very depressed, you can’t even think” (Salinger 91). Hiring a prostitute is a poor choice for any human beings and it is illegal for Holden’s age. Even though he knows it is a mistake, he still accepts the offer anyway. In the end, he pays Sunny five dollars despite of not having sex with her, but she demands for ten dollars instead of five. Later, she returned with the Maurice, the elevator operator, to collect the extra five dollars. When he refuses, Maurice pushes him against the door and punch his stomach while Sunny took the money. The author of Salinger’s biography, J.D. Salinger: A Life, considers this scene as a significant transition for Holden, he writes “From this point, Holden begins to put away his childhood but perceiving no redeeming qualities in the world he is about to enter, he also begins to despair” (Slawenski 209). He is too old to play like a little kid, but he is not yet ready to experience and handle the things in the adult world.
Although Holden did not mention the specific mental illness he has in the novel, it is likely that he has PTSD, which brings an end to his childhood innocence. Studies show that adolescents with PTSD tend to have “three clusters of symptoms: 1) reexperiencing of the the trauma; 2) numbing of responsiveness or reduced involvement with the external world; and 3) arousal (such as exaggerated startle reactions and sleep disturbance)” (Eth xx). Studies also show that a “poor school performance than would be expected on intellectual and academic testing” is a sign of PTSD (Eth 26). Like most of the people with PTSD, Holden displays symptoms of aggressive reactions and sleep disturbance. For instance, his fight with Stradlater after Stradlater refuses to tell him the details about his date with Jane. Stradlater did not do anything wrong, because he has the right of reserving his privacy. Holden’s reaction of socking him is abnormally aggressive than normal people’s reactions. In James Bryan’s journal article, he sees “Holden’s brief blood initiation is, as we shall see, a battle against himself” (Bryan 1067). Jane is part of Holden’s past and he is on a combat of fighting his PTSD and the one of the essential ways to conquer it is to truly set free off his past. He also has sleeping issues too. When he in the hotel in New York, he states, “It was still pretty early. I am not sure what time it was, but it wasn’t too late. The one thing I hate to do is go to bed when I’m not even tired” (Salinger 66). Before he arrives to the hotel to sleep, he has been on a train for almost an entire night from his school to New York. Then, he chooses to go a nightclub to drink and dance with girls. Even after he returns to his room afterwards, he still feels wide awake so he grabs a taxi to go out again. A normal person would feel extremely exhausted after not sleeping for nearly two nights, but the fact he still has trouble falling asleep indicates that he has sleeping issues.
The memory of Allie is traumatizing to Holden, because it haunts him from thinking and responding to a question. After Sunny, the prostitute Holden hires, leaves, Holden feels depressed and starts to talk out loud to Allie, “Okay. Go home and get your bike and meet me in front of Bobby’s House. Hurry up” (Salinger 99). Holden talks to Allie in the way as if he is still alive, but he already passed away three years ago. This shows Holden is in denial of Allie’s death, which is a symptom of PTSD. As mentioned in the third paragraph, he refuses to go to Allie’s grave, because he cannot see him surrounded by a lot of dead people. When his roommate at Pencey, Stradlater, asks him to write a English paper about a house or room for him, he couldn’t think of anything relating to those topics and instead writes “Allie’s baseball mitt. It was a very descriptive subject. It really was” (Salinger 38). The topic of the English paper that Stradlater gives Holden is rather simple, but Holden cannot write anything other than a baseball mitt Allie gives to him while he was alive. In the end of the book, his sister Phoebe asks him to name one thing he likes and his initial response is Allie. When she reminds him that Allie is dead, Holden responded intensively, “I know he’s dead! Don’t you think I know that? I can still like him, though, can’t I? Just because somebody’s dead, you don’t just stop liking them, for God’s sake−” (Salinger 171). Whenever Holden is asked to write about something or answer a simple question, his response is always Allie. His memory of Allie traps him from moving away from the past and forming relationships with the present world, which is the reason why he is unable to find someone who he truly connects by the end of the book. He is not innocent, happy, and spirited like a child anymore, because cannot even name one thing that he likes. The author of this book, J.D. Salinger, builds the main character Holden through his own experience of serving in the World War II. For
Salinger, writing this book was an act of relieving himself from the darkness of the war, because his faith was deeply threatened by the violence and deaths of his friends he had witnessed during the war. His eyes were opened to the darkest side of the human nature. These traumatic memories “of fallen friends haunted Salinger for years, just as Holden was haunted by the ghost of Allie” (Slawenski 214). Holden’s struggles throughout the book is a mirror reflection of Salinger’s own spiritual journey, and that’s the reason why this book is so successful yet so controversial for decades. Holden’s PTSD brings an end to his childhood as his painful loss of Allie’s death robs away his innocence e yet it did not.
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