Reclaiming Holden Caulfield: How to Disseminate Trauma in The Catcher in the Rye

originally published by Limeaid (now defunct)

I was a junior in high school the first time I read “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger. I had tried once before, sometime in middle school, but something about it — not so much the writing style as much as the depth of the content— made me feel like I was in over my head. Holden’s constant matter-of-fact tone juxtaposed bizarrely with complex notions of trauma, and I couldn’t fathom how to bridge that gap.

 

No, this time “Catcher” made sense. I remember sitting in my AP Literature classroom during a period of silent reading and blasting through the pages. Holden, our angsty protagonist, is in the midst of a two-day-long breakdown when he sees the words “fuck you” inscribed in various places at his younger sister’s school. 

 

This sends Holden into yet another tailspin. He fixates on these words, going into hysterics. He debates whether or not to scrub the words off, worrying that a teacher would see him and think he was the person who wrote them. He worries that his sister would read these curse words and wonder what they mean, or that any child, for that matter, would see them. He attempts to remove them with his bare fingers until he realizes they were carved on. A couple hundred words over some standard schoolyard crap.

 

I remember reading that and stopping for a moment. It was nearly deja vu, because I understood him. I understood that feeling of living with blinders on. At 16 years old, I was spending nights coping with a bizarre and overwhelming feeling of lonesomeness that often combined with a new, budding form of anxiety. I couldn’t fully recognize it yet. But I would lie on my back some nights, swallowing, and feeling as if someone was sitting on my chest. 

 

I would think, and I couldn’t stop. Some nights I was paranoid of being stalked, somehow. That I was mistreating the friends I did have or was being mistreated. That I wasn’t a good enough daughter. That I would never make anything of myself. Or, more specifically — did I say something awkward that day? Something mean by mistake? Was I studying hard enough? It would swallow me.

 

I read Holden Caulfield, scrubbing incessantly at a bathroom wall, and I instinctively understood something I had slowly been picking up the entire book: he was like me. Among all his weirdness and pretension, I could tell this was a teenager my age trying to cope with his own mental health, specifically his anxiety, exacerbated by some very serious trauma. 

 

My affinity with Holden has lasted years. I felt the urge to reread the novel a few months back and the same feelings of recognition bubbled to the surface. Still, though, I’m always reluctant to say that I like Holden, that I understand him. It’s a classic novel, right? No one judges anyone for latching onto other characters with social difficulties; Mr. Darcy is swoon-worthy, and Eponine’s one of the most relatable adolescent characters of all time. 

 

But Holden?

 

If you’re reading this, you probably already know why. He’s often interpreted as the cornerstone of privileged, misogynist male entitlement. Just a simple Google search places Holden Caulfield as an early predecessor to the contemporary incel movement, and it’s common knowledge that Mark David Chapman, the man who killed John Lennon fifty years ago, was arrested holding “Catcher,” crediting the novel for motivating the murder. Frustrated and entitled, young men for decades have held Holden Caulfield as a member of their own tribe.

 

I’m not writing this to discount any of that. There’s weight in it — look at the life of Holden’s creator, J.D. Salinger. While he kept most of his life under tight privacy, it was known that he had a taste for younger women, dating girls often under twenty and sometimes even minors throughout his life. There are toxic undercurrents to the writing of “Catcher,” and I don’t want to deny that.

 

However, Holden Caulfield is capable of standing on his own. He’s a teenager terrified of sex in a world that ties female sexual domination to manhood. His apprehension to tying anything sexual to his favorite summer fling, Jane, is often attributed as a variant of the Madonna-Whore Dichotomy, which essentially states that many misogynistic, heterosexual men view female sexual partners as dirty, bad or impure, but if they respect a woman, they won’t be able to view her in a sexual light because she’s therefore good and chaste. 

 

I don’t think this is a signal of Holden’s misogyny, though; in fact, I think it’s a symptom of the trauma he’s trying to come to terms with. Near the end of the book, Holden takes refuge at the home of a trusted teacher for the night — he wakes up to the teacher drunkenly stroking his forehead in what’s alluded to be a sexual manner. He then begins to shake and sweat, running out of the apartment. 

 

“That kind of stuff’s happened to me about twenty times since I was a kid,” Holden says, “I can’t stand it.” This wasn’t a new experience. Holden’s clearly dealing with some heavy-handed trauma — of course it would seep into his blossoming relationships. Something I feel the need to remind people of is Holden’s age; he’s sixteen. He’s not going to be well into his trauma work. The year is 1950, and therapy wasn’t as wide-spread and accepted as it is now. Hyper masculinity absolutely crippled him.

 

There are countless other moments I’d like to touch on, that myself and other pro-Holden peers of mine clutch onto: hiring a sex worker just to have someone to talk to, for instance, or his panic about where the ducks in Central Park go in the wintertime. His fixation on a girl, Sally, and running away with her to start a life in the wilderness. Wanting to kill himself but hating the idea of someone having to see his broken body. “Catcher” is laden with these intimate, personal moments that have resonated with generations of readers.

 

Interpreting him as an incel is an act of ignorance toward Holden’s character – it’s a disservice, honestly. It’s ignoring the layered heaviness of Holden’s character and his past, in favor of minimizing a complicated story into who’s phony and who’s real, which women are worth respecting and which aren’t. No, Holden Caulfield can be representative of generations of teenagers doing their best to figure themselves out in a world that can feel so hauntingly alone. 

It’s been seventy years — the misogynists have held him long enough. In a society being forced to reckon with how we comprehend mental health – with Gen Z being the most mentally ill generation on record – it’s important that to observe trauma for what it is. It’s time to take Holden, his troubles and his angst, his anxiety and his beauty, back to where he belongs: to those who understand him.