Catcher In The Rye Holden's Downfall Analysis
Phoniness was Holden’s Downfall
Holden Caulfield sees life and the entire world as a struggle between the artificial things and those that are authentic. His main pasttime is to detect phoniness in other people’s lives and to harshly critisize it, as well. And, although he loves the purity and innocence that childhood brings with it, and hates the artificiality of the adult world, he is, troughout the story of “The Catcher in the Rye“, gradually forced into it, due to his surroundings as well as himself. Sanford Pinsker described the book as beinga “mixture of bright talk and brittle manners, religious quest and nervous breakdown, [which] captured not only the perennial confusions of adolescence, but also the spiritual discomforts of an entire age.” His quest for phoniness is successful, yet the …show more content…
To understand the novel’s setting and some of the character’s motifs, one must have an understanding of the time in which it is set, which is the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. After the 1930’s, the economy improved greatly. There came a huge financial influx with World War II, plus the financial programs of the new president Franklin D Roosevelt, helped the US finally get over the Great Depression. In the following years, the 1940’s and 1950’s, politics of the country became more conservative (which is the time-setting of the novel). During the years of America’s involvement in WWII, between 1941 and 1945, the average weekly earnings of an american had almost doubled. During this time, women also contributed to the economy, since they had to take over some of the jobs while the men were fighting overseas. This was an important step towards the emancipation of women. Other women returned to their position as a housewife when the troops came home, enabling enough jobs to be free for the men to return to. In early 1950 there was also the whole McCarthy fiaso for Americans
Holden Caulfield sees life and the entire world as a struggle between the artificial things and those that are authentic. His main pasttime is to detect phoniness in other people’s lives and to harshly critisize it, as well. And, although he loves the purity and innocence that childhood brings with it, and hates the artificiality of the adult world, he is, troughout the story of “The Catcher in the Rye“, gradually forced into it, due to his surroundings as well as himself. Sanford Pinsker described the book as beinga “mixture of bright talk and brittle manners, religious quest and nervous breakdown, [which] captured not only the perennial confusions of adolescence, but also the spiritual discomforts of an entire age.” His quest for phoniness is successful, yet the …show more content…
To understand the novel’s setting and some of the character’s motifs, one must have an understanding of the time in which it is set, which is the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. After the 1930’s, the economy improved greatly. There came a huge financial influx with World War II, plus the financial programs of the new president Franklin D Roosevelt, helped the US finally get over the Great Depression. In the following years, the 1940’s and 1950’s, politics of the country became more conservative (which is the time-setting of the novel). During the years of America’s involvement in WWII, between 1941 and 1945, the average weekly earnings of an american had almost doubled. During this time, women also contributed to the economy, since they had to take over some of the jobs while the men were fighting overseas. This was an important step towards the emancipation of women. Other women returned to their position as a housewife when the troops came home, enabling enough jobs to be free for the men to return to. In early 1950 there was also the whole McCarthy fiaso for Americans