Allie Holden's Younger Brother example essay topic

Holden Caulfield - The protagonist and narrator of the novel. When the novel opens, Holden is a sixteen year-old junior at a school called Pencey Prep; he has just been expelled for academic failure. Holden is intelligent and sensitive, but he narrates his story in a cynical, jaded voice. Though he never says so outright, he longs to live in a beautiful and innocent world, and finds the hypocrisy and ugliness of the world around him almost unbearably painful; his cynicism is his attempt to protect himself from the pain and disappointment of the adult world.

As the novel opens, Holden stands poised on the cliff separating childhood from adulthood; his damaged innocence also leaves him poised on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Ackley - Holden's next-door neighbor in the dorm at Pencey Prep, a pimply, insecure boy with terrible dental hygiene. Ackley often barges into Holden's room and acts completely oblivious to Holden's hints that he should leave; he also makes up elaborate lies about his sexual experience. Stradlater - Holden's roommate. Stradlater is handsome, self- satisfied, and popular, but Holden calls him a "secret slob" -- his razor, for instance, is disgustingly unclean. Stradlater is sexually mature and experienced for a Pencey boy, and utterly preoccupied with himself; he tends to assume everyone else is preoccupied with him, too.

Jane Gallagher - Holden's former girlfriend, now dating Stradlater. Jane's summer house in Maine is next door to the Caulfields'. Jane never actually appears in The Catcher in the Rye, but she is extremely important to Holden -- she is one of the few people who seem to understand and care about him, and is the only person with whom Holden feels comfortable discussing Allie's death. Jane's stepfather is an alcoholic, and their relationship is painful and strained. Phoebe - Holden's ten year-old sister. Holden loves Phoebe very dearly; even though she is six years younger, she tends to understand what he means, and he feels comfortable talking to her.

Phoebe is intelligent, neat, and a wonderful dancer. Her childish innocence is one of Holden's only consistent sources of happiness throughout the novel. Allie - Holden's younger brother, who died of leukemia three years before the start of the novel. Allie was a brilliant, friendly, redheaded boy; Holden says he was the smartest of the Caulfields, and is tormented by his death. The night Allie died, Holden slept in the garage, and broke all the windows with his bare hands, shattering both his hands and landing him in the hospital during Allie's funeral.

One of Holden's most prized possessions, a baseball glove on which Allie wrote poems in green ink, first belonged to Allie. D.B. - Holden's older brother, a writer. D.B. used to write stories that Holden admired, but before the start of the novel he moved to Hollywood to write for the movies, lured by the money -- he now drives a Jaguar and dates movie stars. Holden still thinks D.B. is adequate company, but can't quite forgive his brother for selling out to the movies, which Holden considers the phoniest and most despicable entertainment imaginable. Sally Hayes - Another of Holden's girlfriends, a young socialite who attends the Mary A. Woodruff girls's chool. Unlike Jane's, Sally's main motivation is to be attractive and popular, and she succeeds.

Holden is attracted to Sally's beauty and charisma, but her hypocrisy and cruelty repel him. Carl Luce - A student at Columbia whom Holden knew when they both attended the Whooton School. Luce is three years older than Holden, and has a great deal of sexual experience; at Whooton, he used to entertain the younger boys with sex stories and advice. Now he is dating a Chinese sculptress in Greenwich Village whom he believes to be in her late 30's. Holden considers Luce to be effeminate and possibly deviant, but he claims to find him amusing. Mr. Antolini - Holden's former English teacher at the Elkton Hills School, now a teacher at New York University.

Mr. Antolini is young, clever, sympathetic and likable, and Holden seems to respect him. But Mr. Antolini sometimes seems a bit too clever to Holden, and he also appears to have a drinking problem. The Catcher in the Rye is narrated by Holden Caulfield, a sixteen year-old boy recuperating in a rest home from a nervous breakdown, some time in 1950. Holden tells the story of his last day at a school called Pencey Prep, and of his subsequent psychological meltdown in New York City. Holden has been expelled from Pencey for academic failure, and after an unpleasant evening with his self-satisfied roommate Stradlater and their pimply next-door neighbor Ackley, he decides to leave Pencey for good and spend a few days alone in New York City before returning to his parents' Manhattan apartment. In New York, he succumbs to increasing feelings of loneliness and desperation brought on by the hypocrisy and ugliness of the adult world; he feels increasingly tormented by the memory of his younger brother Allie's death, and his life is complicated by his burgeoning sexuality.

He wants to see his sister Phoebe and his old girlfriend Jane Gallagher, but instead he spends his time with Sally Hayes, a shallow socialite Holden's age, and Carl Luce, a pretentious Columbia student Holden treats as a source of sexual knowledge. Increasingly lonely, Holden finally decides to sneak back to his parents' apartment to talk to Phoebe. He borrows some money from her, then goes to stay with his former English teacher, Mr. Antolini. When he believes Mr. Antolini to be making a homosexual advance toward him, Holden leaves his apartment, and spends the rest of the night on a bench in Grand Central Station. The next day Holden experiences the worst phase of his nervous breakdown. He wanders the streets, looking at children and talking to Allie.

He tries to leave New York forever and hitchhike west, but when Phoebe insists on going with him he relents, agreeing to go back home to protect his sister from the ugliness of the world. He takes her to the park, and watches her ride on the merry-go-round; he suddenly feels overwhelmed by an inexplicable, intense happiness. Holden concludes his story by refusing to talk about what happened after that, but he fills in the most important details: he went home, was sent to the rest home, and will attend a new school next year. He regrets telling his story to so many people; talking about it, he says, makes him miss everyone. 1. Discuss Holden as a narrator.

How does his cynical tone affect his description of his experiences and feelings? How can we understand him as a character? Holden is a sensitive and innocent boy adrift in a world that has no sympathy for his sensitivity or his innocence, a world whose hypocrisy and ugliness disappoint and threaten him very deeply. His cynical attitude is often an attempt to defend his feelings from the shortcomings of the outside world; at heart, Holden is an idealist, and resorts to bitterness and anger when the world's failure to match his ideal picture of it makes him sad. As a result, the story he tells is only a part of the whole story; he often glides over moments of particular trauma, or treats painful moments by pretending not to care. To understand his character, it is necessary to look beyond his words at his behavior, taking the knowledge of his personality acquired from his narration and applying it to his actions in the story.

When Holden tells about being beaten and robbed by Maurice the elevator operator, for instance, he admits that he thought he was dying, and fantasizes about being a movie hero and seeking his revenge. But he never describes how any of this makes him feel; his sole comment is that the "goddam movies" can ruin a person. Only by learning from previous moments in the book that Holden is a deeply sensitive boy -- when he writes about Allie, for instance -- can we look beneath the surface of Holden's narrative to see the suffering it covers up. 2. What is the significance of the book's title? What does it mean to be a "catcher in the rye"?

The significance of the title is explained in Chapter 22, when Holden tells Phoebe what he would like to do with his life. He says he'd like to stand on the edge of a cliff, by a rye field in which thousands of little children were playing a game. When any children came to close to the edge of the cliff, Holden would catch them to keep them from falling. Since Holden himself stands on the border between childhood and adulthood, between innocence and disillusionment, the image of saving children from the cliff by the rye field seems clearly to work as a metaphor for the protection of innocence from the adult world. Holden loves children and is cheered by them throughout the novel -- this image was suggested to him in the first place by a little child singing "if a body catch a body coming through the rye". He wants to protect them from the same harsh loss of innocence he himself is experiencing, an experience which began most painfully after Allie's death.

Taking that role as a protector is what it means to be a "catcher in the rye"; it is important to recognize the complete lack of any such figure in Holden's own life. In the novel, it first appears that Mr. Antolini will act as one -- he even perceives that Holden is experiencing a "fall" -- but Holden's interpretation of Mr. Antolini stroking his hair wrecks any chance the teacher might have of protecting him from that fall. The most important protective act in the novel is actually Holden's own -- when he decides not to go west because of the consequences his action would have for Phoebe. 3. Holden's sexuality plays an extremely important part in his experience; his decisions and his behavior are often motivated by sexual desire. What is the role of sexuality in The Catcher in the Rye?

Holden stands on the threshold between childhood and adulthood. He is consistently hurt and humiliated by the hypocrisy and ugliness of the adult world, and his admiration for children seems to indicate his longing for the outlook of childhood. Sexuality is the force that makes a return to that outlook impossible. Many of Holden's most traumatic encounters with the adult world -- the blowup with the prostitute and Maurice, for instance -- are occasioned by his sexuality; sexual desire consistently incites him, almost against his will, to move more and more deeply into the adult world. If the transition from innocence to experience is like falling off the cliff by the rye field, sexuality is the force that will eventually make Holden jump. 4.

Though Holden never describes his psychological breakdown directly, it becomes increasingly clear as the novel progresses that he is extremely unstable and probably experiencing a nervous breakdown. How does Salinger indicate this instability to the reader while protecting his narrator's reticence? Salinger uses two main techniques with great efficiency. The first is to emphasize a contrast between Holden's relatively casual description of his actions and the apparent desperation of the actions themselves. When Holden describes walking to the Central Park duck pond late at night, for instance, he casually mentions that he had icicles in his hair and worried about catching pneumonia, but he does not seem to consider it strange to walk outdoors with wet hair in freezing weather. It does seem strange to the reader, however, and Salinger uses that sense of strangeness, as well as Holden's apparent obliviousness to it, to emphasize his mental imbalance.

His other main technique is to use other characters' responses to Holden behavior to fill in what Holden doesn't tell us about his own behavior. When he has his meltdown with Sally, for instance, and tries to persuade her to flee society and live with him in a cabin, she repeatedly asks him to stop shouting. In his account of the scene, Holden claims he wasn't shouting, but we believe Sally, and Salinger uses her angry, fearful response to signal to the reader that Holden's mental state is worse than he admits.