The Passage Ritual In The Catcher In The Rye

The Catcher in the Rye has long been studied as an adolescent novel since its publication, but whether it belongs to traditional western Bildungsroman is still suspended. The debate mainly focuses on whether Holden finally achieves his maturity in the novel. As for Holden's maturity, there are some critics who have ventured to collect evidence to defend Holden's final maturity, but those evidence sounds powerless and unconvincing and their reasoning seems unsystematic and more like speculation. Given all these weaknesses, this paper takes an attempt to read the book as a passage ritual. Then Holden's maturity will be reasonable under the framework of this ritual.The term rites de passage was first used by Arnold van Gennep in his book of that name. It refers to a range of rituals which mark the state change in one's life, such as the birth, adolescence, marriage and death. It contains the following three phases: separation, liminality and aggregation. This paper holds that The Catcher in the Rye is just a record of this ritual in the form of literature. Holden Caulfield's behaviors of leaving family and dropping out school can be read as the first phase of"separation,"while his odyssey in New York City as the second of"liminality."In the end, with his sister Phoebe's help, Holden finally reaches the phase of"aggregation."Thus, the first and most important aim of this paper is to reveal this ritual customs. Then, in the hope of drawing the novel on the list of Bildungsroman, the author comes up with an explanation that Holden's maturity is not what so-called some critics'one-sided wish, but a natural result of the process of the ritual. Lastly, by introducing"rites de passage,"the paper attempts to draw attention of the literary circle to the theory of"liminality."...