Holden's Thoughts And Personal Feelings example essay topic

People go through depressing periods in their lives as teenagers, and some experience it more severely or for longer periods of time than others. In The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger expresses this time of dejection through the protagonist Holden's thoughts and personal feelings. Holden's tone reinforces a theme of suicide and depression. He is sarcastic, biter, and occasionally upbeat. Holden's skepticism and sarcasm stem from his belief that many people are fake. He believes that many people are insincere in their attitudes, and in what they express publicly, like when Ernie the piano player shows off, "Anyway, when he was finished, and everybody was clapping their heads off, old Ernie turned around on his stool and gave this very phony, humble bow" (84).

Holden knew that Ernie thought highly of himself so he thought it very fake for him to give a seemingly humble bow. Holden seems to act one way and feel another, because he always involves himself with people that make him feel depressed, and then feels bad about it. He cynically evaluates mannerisms of people including their word choice. He comments on a word Sally selected, and says "Grand.

If there's one word I hate, It's grand. It's so phony" (106). Certain words cause Holden to repel people, based on the deceit that he thinks the word carries along. Feeling as if he is drowning in a sea of falsehood, Holden constantly find himself feeling depressed because nothing is what it is trying to be. When Holden feels as if some sort of purity is threatened he assumes a bitter, angry tone. When Stradlater, someone he knows as very sexually intimate, went on a date with Jane, Holden's childhood friend, Holden became so angry that he reacted physically: "I got off from the bed... and then I tried to sock him, with all my might, right smack in the toothbrush, so it would split his goddamn throat open" (43).

This shows that Holden feels it his responsibility to preserve all innocence, to prevent people or things from becoming phony. His failure to do so results in uncontrollable bouts of rage. When he reads swear words in the bathroom of his sister's school, he says "I kept wanting to kill whoever'd written it" (201). He was thinking about all the children who would see the words, and felt powerless to stop its effects, so he became extremely angry.

Holden is usually depressed, yet in a certain light, when reminiscing about his childhood and the innocence held in those memories, Holden is uncharacteristically happy. He remembers certain unique things about Jane, one whom he holds dear, and to him may be the definition of purity, "She wouldn't move any of her kings... She'd get them all lined up in the back row. Then she never used them. She just liked the way they looked in the back row" (31-32)". He was remembering the way that Jane used to play Checkers.

The way she liked to look at her pieces rather than use them creates an innocent aura. Holden's brother Allie was also a figure of innocence. "My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt... The thing that was descriptive though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink" (38). He remembers this clearly because an image of reading poetry off a baseball mitt during the game is very innocent.

Holden can only escape into happiness rarely, for its all in his memory now. Jane matured, and Allie died of leukemia. Holden's sardonic and pessimistic, and bitter and angry tones show his never ending depression, and feelings of suicide. He's sarcastic in an environment he refuses to leave, he's bitter when he fails to protect innocence, and he's happy when he makes brief escapades into his memories. Some teens are more intensely depressed than others, and Holden is just trying to cope.