Holder In The Catcher in the Rye By J. D. Salinger
He is stuck on the bridge between being an adult and a child and does not know here he wants to go. He doesn’t know what he wants to do or be in the future. Throughout the book, Holder makes many references to the ducks that he saw a few times in Central Park. He says, “The ducks. Do you know, by any chance? I mean does somebody come around in a truck or something and take them away, or do they fly away by themselves- go south or something? “(Slinger 91 This could be a symbol for Holder and his life. Holder is wondering where the ducks will go, very much like he is wondering where he himself will go.
Holder wonders if he will have to get up and go nowhere on his own, or if someone will come along and help him out before things get too difficult. Holder is thinking about where the ducks will go when it gets cold and hard for them to survive. He is also thinking about where he will go when life gets even more difficult and harder for him to survive on his own. Holder is also scared for the future of children. He has experienced firsthand what it is like to be extremely stressed and forced to grow up quickly. He does not like growing up and he just wants to be a child forever.
Holder wants to save children from falling into the world of adulthood. He says, “Navy, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. Know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.
This shows that Holder actually is caring for the children in the world and he wants to help them keep their innocence in any way that he can. Throughout the Story, Holder mentions his little brother Allele. Allele passed away when they were little of cancer. Holder feels guilty and upset over Allies death and really misses him. Allele was one of the few people who Holder actually loved and cared about. Allele had an old baseball mitt with poems written all over it that he would read while standing in the field. While talking about Allies old baseball mitt that Holder kept, he says “You’d have liked him.
He was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as intelligent. He was terrifically intelligent. His teachers were always writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a boy like Allele in their class. And they weren’t just shooting the crap. They really meant it. But it wasn’t just that he was the most intelligent member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never got mad at anybody. God, he was a nice kid, though. He used to laugh so hard at something he thought of at the dinner table that he just about fell off his chair.
