Holden As The Misfit Hero

The Catcher in the Rye,a 1951 novel by American author J.D.Salinger,remains influential and enduring until now.It deals with the nightmarish three-day journey of a sixteen-year-old adolescent called Holden Caulfield from the first-person perspective.Holden has witnessed how decadent and degenerate that the city life is and how phony and hypocritical those citizens are.The narration starts with Holden‘s last day at Pencey Prep after flunking out it because of his poor academic performance and ends up with his therapy in a mental hospital.In the three-day wandering,Holden feels overwhelmingly depressed and confused confronted with the forces of alienation in the society and his emotion seems increasingly out of control.Nevertheless,Holden is determined to fight against the alienating society courageously instead of conforming to it.In the middle of the twentieth century,many social problems have accumulated in America.America after the Second World War has amassed great sums of wealth.The rapid development of economy and technology brought enormous changes to the modes of thinking and the lifestyles of people.Materialism and hedonism prevailed in the society.The market and public opinion developed into the anonymous authority to which people conformed unconsciously.Alienation has turned into a social phenomenon rather than an individual phenomenon.As a matter of fact,alienation is by no means a modern phenomenon but experiences a long history.Based on the alienation theory in the field of sociology,we can derive a general definition of alienation which means a condition of man where his own act becomes an alien power to him,standing over and against him instead of being ruled by him.The alienated person experiences himself as a thing,a commodity,and an instrument but fails to experience him as an active agent,as a result of which he loses the sense of self.As an adolescent who is about to transit into his adulthood,Holden Caulfield,the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye is confused of his own identity in the world.Rebelling against the rules of the world,he seeks the sense of self and holds on to what he considers as significant.In the market-oriented society,when others make efforts to meet the social standard of success,Holden dreams of being a catcher in the rye to protect the innocent children from the contamination of the hypocritical and phony adulthood.The alienated society arouses inner conflicts and struggles of Holden and leads to a sense of detachment between him and the world around him.While others strive to fit into the current patterns of modern life,Holden‘s search for the sense of self and his rebellion against alienation turn him into a misfit hero.In this thesis,the origin and development of the alienation theory are explored and the theories of American sociologist Erich Fromm constitute the main theoretical framework,based on which the theme of alienation in The Catcher in the Rye is studied within specific historical background.This thesis unfolds three perspectives of alienation in the novel including the conforming society,the standardized education and the alienated interpersonal relationship,explores Holden‘s psychological condition which is permeated with conflicts and contradiction under the pervasive forces of alienation,and finally focuses on Holden‘s courageous rebellion against alienation by means of his resolute escape,his faith in love and his attachment to nature.Through analyzing a sixteen-year-old adolescent‘s psychological experience and physical action in the face of the forces of alienation in the society,this thesis concludes a more practical way to fight against alienation,from which the contemporary adolescents can obtain an inspiration.