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the vaguely defined West for the same reason that Mark Twain, with similar vagueness, in Huckleberry Finn, held out the promise of a revitalizing West for an even younger American individualist. Both writers at the end are working not on the level of realism but on the lower stratum of American myth. What Salinger suggests in his final page is that, while the America represented for Holden by Pencey Prep, New York City, and even the new West, is a far cry from the pastoral America which Holden periodically has cherished in fantasy, still that earlier spirit of self-knowledge through private action and self-reliance endures unchanged to serve as a source of emotional strength to young Americans. Holden’s reaction to the psychiatrist’s question tells us that he, at least, will not be poured forthwith into the modern mould of Ivy-League conformity and Madison Avenue commercialism. And second, Holden, like that earlier New York transcendentalist, Walt Whitman, has recognized too the “hollowness at heart” of an urban society shot through with every form of “deceit in the spirit”; and yet Holden at the end, also like Whitman, is able to affirm a social brotherhood with the complex humanity of men. Why should we invite ourselves to lament this passing of a naïve idealism and, in effect, to have Holden remain little more than a modern, uncompromising Young Goodman Brown? 8 Through the symbols of the cap, the carrousel, and the American West, Salinger traces on the final pages Holden’s first steps on the way to his discovery of a new life. Whether this symbolic ending tries to imply too much while rendering too little is not the issue here. What is important is that the symbols need to be adequately accounted for if we are to know what the novel has finally tried to say. I have suggested that they reinforce each other and point the way to Holden’s redemption into life rather than alienation and withdrawal from it. His too-innocent idealism has begun to give way to the hopeful beginnings of maturity and a saner view both of himself and of the America in which he must live. From Western Humanities Review 17.3 (Summer 1963): 271-277. Copyright © 1963 by Western Humanities Review. Reprinted with permission of Western Humanities Review. 304 Critical Insights
Notes 1. The sociologically oriented reader is doubtless tempted to relate Holden’s instability to another cause, the Caulfield’s rather improvised homelife—the mother being a chain-smoking insomniac and the father an ex-Catholic and peripatetic lawyer. But Salinger neither suggests that this home environment is abnormal in our time nor that it has played a decisive part in moulding Holden’s acutely sensitive reactions to the world. In virtually all of Salinger’s fiction, for that matter, the parents are relegated to a humiliating role of insignificance in the lives of their precocious children. 2. The Catcher in the Rye (New York, 1953), pp. 153, 154. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. 3. Two interpretations of the carrousel present a less optimistic view of Holden’s progress. Edgar Branch writes that the carrousel “goes round and round, going nowhere—a dynamic moment of happy, static immaturity eternalized in his mind.” (“Mark Twain and J. D. Salinger: A Study in Literary Continuity,” American Quarterly, IX, Summer, 1957, 149.) Arthur Heiserman and James E. Miller, Jr., hold out even less hope for Holden: “So at the end, like the hero of Antic Hay, Holden delights in circles—a comforting, bounded figure which yet connotes hopelessness. . . . From that lunatic delight in a circle, he is shipped off to the psychiatrist. For Holden loves the world more than the world can bear.” (“J. D. Salinger: Some Crazy Cliff,” Western Humanities Review, X, Spring, 1956, 131.) 4. Charles Kaplan, “Holden and Huck: The Odysseys of Youth,” College English, XVIII (November, 1956), 78. 5. Branch, op. cit., p. 156. 6. Heiserman and Miller, op. cit., p. 134. 7. Critical opinion here again has insisted that Holden remains a confirmed isolate at the end of the book. Alfred Kazin includes Holden in the sweeping pronouncement that “in Salinger’s work the two estates—the world and the cutely sensitive young—never really touch at all.” (“J. D. Salinger: ‘Everybody’s Favorite,’” reprinted in Contemporaries, Boston, 1962, p. 238.) For Maxwell Geismar, Holden’s statements represent the smugly removed “peak of well-to-do and neurotic anarchism.” (“J. D. Salinger: The Wise Child and the New Yorker School of Fiction,” in American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity, New York, 1958.) Peter J. Seng, otherwise perceptive in noting Holden’s obvious incapacity to act as an arbiter of moral values in an adult society, insists that Holden at the end is the tragic author of his own undoing. Holden’s “flaw” resides in “a naïve refusal to come to terms with the world in which he lives.” (“The Fallen Idol: The Immature World of Holden Caulfield,” College English, XXIII, December, 1961, 209.) 8. Authors Heiserman and Miller, op. cit., p. 137, come rather close to such a conclusion: “As we leave Holden alone in his room in the psychiatric ward, we are aware of the book’s last ironic incongruity. It is not Holden who should be examined for a sickness of the mind, but the world in which he has sojourned and found himself an alien. To ‘cure’ Holden, he must be given the contagious, almost universal disease of phony adultism; he must be pushed over that ‘crazy cliff.’” Symbolic Resolution in The Catcher in the Rye 305
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