Alienation In Catcher In The Rye

A small boy takes his first step, falling as he tries. There is no one watching. No one to help him up. With tears streaming down his plush cheeks, he continues on crawling. As he grows, he never truly learns how to walk, but he holds onto his surroundings to hold him up. Years later, he has completely tricked his mind into thinking he can walk on his own, but when one of his crutches breaks in two, he is back at crawling. With a death in his family, he crashes back into reality that he is once again alone with no helping hand. He searches through life for support, but is only put down farther. He has no friends nor family to turn to and must put the pressure on himself. In an attempt to heal his wounds, he hides who he truly is, both from …show more content…
He wants to go to the big football game, but instead watches for a short time in the distance, then leaves. This alienation is defined in “A Retrospective Look at The Catcher in the Rye” as “the negative side of detachment” (Rosen 97). Although Holden could easily walk down and watch the game with everyone else, he makes the choice himself to turn around, thus isolating himself even more. However, he quickly reaches out for those around him once again when he goes to visit his old teacher, Mr. Spencer. Being much older than Holden, he is seen as disgustingly old in Holden’s eyes, which soon drives him to leave and alienate himself once more. Throughout the novel, Holden contacts old friends and classmates in an attempt to bond with someone to possibly make himself feel better. No matter how hard he tries, Holden continuously finds that “his contemporaries don’t see what he sees or hear what he is saying either” (102). With each person that he meets that doesn’t agree with his views, he views them as “phonies,” but will make up various excuses for why he thinks this of them. As he searches throughout the novel for a soul to help him up, he simply pushes them away as he digs himself deeper into desperate