Catcher in the Rye.vp - Salem Press

Perhaps if we look at what Salinger has actually written in this final
chapter, we may find that the outlook for Holden is not quite this bleak.
Certain signs can be taken as encouraging. The first is Holden’s response
to the psychoanalyst, who has asked Holden if he is going to
change and apply himself in school during the coming autumn. Holden
answers like the common-sense American frontiersman of old:
It’s such a stupid question, in my opinion. I mean how do you know what
you’re going to do till you do it? The answer is, you don’t. I think I am, but
how do I know? I swear it’s a stupid question. (192)
Despite Hollywood, modern psychoanalysis, and power of positive
thinking around him, Holden in the West is beginning to face reality in
the pragmatic frontier spirit and intends to discover his private, workable
solutions to life in America. As the children on the carrousel must
do, he will live through his experience as it comes. What he thinks he
should do—his private idealism—will be put to the test of American
pragmatism, what he does and must do.
The second encouraging sign appears in Holden’s reaction to his
Hollywood brother D. B.’s question: what does Holden think about his
recent crisis? Again, Holden does not intellectualize his problem. But
he makes a confession that points to an advance over his previous gestures
of rebellion and retreat, as well as his unsuccessful attempts to
break through the wall of phoniness in American society to achieve
love and community. He recognizes the need for a balance between the
size of the head (Professor Antolini’s earlier emphasis) and the size of
the heart. What Holden says at the close is, “About all I know is, I sort
of miss everybody I told about. Even old Stradlater and Ackley, for instance.
I think I even miss that goddam Maurice” (192). The prospect
for Holden is that he may now be able to give people a “buzz” on the
phone and achieve communication. 7
If Holden’s comments at the end point the way out of sickness and
into wholeness, one can only assume that Salinger has placed his hero in
Symbolic Resolution in The Catcher in the Rye 303