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By Root 1536 0

his younger brother Allie. As he writes, Holden relays the story of ten-year-old Allie and his death from leukemia three years before. Although he tells the story in an almost nonchalant way, it is among the most sobering portions of the book. Only at this point do readers begin to understand the scale of Holden’s anguish. All of his traits and reactions are dominated by his brother’s death. In his memory, Allie possesses something that Holden cherishes above all else and has lost: his innocence. Holden lost it on the night he lost Allie, and the two losses are inseparably entwined. In his mind, to enter adulthood would be to abandon Allie and, in doing so, sever his tie to the memory of his own innocence.

Holden goes beyond preserving Allie through memory. He idealizes his dead brother, elevating him to a near-holy status. In the absence of adult supervision, he reinvents Allie as a reproachful parent-god. When he becomes depressed, he searches out his brother for comfort, and if he feels besieged, he actually prays to Allie. As Holden moves into adulthood, he drifts away from Allie, farther from his own ability to live up to the standards of purity and genuineness that Allie represents to him.

Depressed over his memory of Allie and frustrated over the possible spoiling of Jane Gallagher’s innocence, Holden has a fistfight with Stradlater. Bloodied and dejected, Holden packs his suitcase and decides to leave Pencey that night, although he is not expected home until Wednesday.

Holden’s rebellion against the world around him contains a judgment on mankind. Salinger’s postwar preoccupation with the opposing forces of human nature developed into a vision of the world as being divided between the genuine and the phony, the enlightened and the insensitive, the Tyger and the Lamb. Holden Caulfield also divides the world between camps of “us and them,” but his camp is a small one indeed, consisting only of his sister, Phoebe, his dead brother, Allie, and, perhaps, the reader.

Once in New York, Holden decides to check into a hotel and avoid being home when his parents receive word that he has been expelled from school. After arriving at Grand Central Station, he catches a cab and gets a room at the seedy Edmont Hotel. He finds the hotel “full of perverts.” Supplied with Christmas money sent by his grandmother, he goes out on the town. He visits two bars, where he meets three girls who stick him with the bill and a former girlfriend of D.B., his older brother. Returning to the hotel, Holden is approached by an elevator operator named Maurice, who offers him a prostitute for five dollars. Holden accepts.

While valuing innocence, Holden is still attracted to adult situations. Bars, prostitutes, the backseats of cars, all lure him. Upon entering these situations, he cannot deal with them. By cutting himself off from the world around him, Holden has left himself no other figure to turn to for advice than Allie. Without guidance, which Allie’s now-eternal youth cannot provide in these adult situations, Holden recoils from them and from any transition that takes him where Allie has never been.

He defends his alienation with scorn for adult society and a refusal to compromise with it. Holden’s contempt is not reserved for adults alone. He identifies many of his own age and younger as being equally phony. Holden’s problem is actually with the living—those who continue to live the life that his pure brother has been denied. He measures the quality of the lives around him not by his own standards but by Allie’s. The challenge that Holden encounters is to reevaluate his perceptions in order to find a place in the world of the living.

Holden’s acute perception is also a source of his own self-derision. Already corrupted by the things he disdains, he seeks refuge in flights of fancy. These are only momentary flights, and he finds himself increasingly having to deal with reality. Although he would like the world to accept him on his own terms, he knows that he will eventually have to compromise. In a way, his weekend in New York is his