I am Holden Caulfield (Part 2)

The response I received earlier made me decide to go a bit more indepth with my previous post about The Catcher in the Rye. This time, I’ll focus more on myself and how I view myself in relation to Holden Caulfield as a character. As I said in the response to that question, Holden’s cynicism is a result of his disappointment with the world around him and his own innate idealism.

To start off, not to be all angsty or self-righteous or anything but I can definitely relate with much of Holden’s mindset. Growing up, I was the kind of person who wanted nothing more than to help people and get along with as many people as possible. I was the sort of person that never was in any sort of cliques but got along with everyone on a casual level. I was the kind of person that if anyone disliked me for any reason, I went out of my way to figure out why and make sure I corrected it.

When I got older (around the time I started college), I started to become disheartened with the people around me and how boring I felt they were, I felt as if they lacked any sense of passion or purpose. This was most apparent in my group of friends at the time. I wanted to see them happy, I wanted to see them accomplish something and truly live. It eventually struck me that the average person I come across has no interest in “the bigger picture” and seem to be fascinated only with themselves completely in the present with no sense of wonder or beauty. I often find that people can’t appreciate things outside their own scope, they refuse to acknowledge and accept that the world is bigger than them and that there is so much more to the world than they know.

You can only watch people mess up or hurt each other so much before you begin to lose heart, sadly. One could say that most cynics are just those who cared about something or someone, perhaps even everyone, more than they should and adopted cynicism to cope with the disappointments they would experience in the future. I truly believe most cynics were once idealists until the world or someone close to them in some way or another wore them down. Most are still probably idealistic at heart but don’t want to believe that they still hold on to ideas that if shared might be viewed as “naive”, “childish”, or “simple”.

It was because I was such an idealist at first that I hated Holden but eventually I came around to seeing where he was coming from a bit better. Holden is truly disappointed in the world he lives in simply because he knows it could be so much more. Holden is a true romantic in every sense of the word, I think he’s a character that will continue to ring true with many for decades, even centuries, to come.