Adultism in Catcher in the Rye & Huckleberry Finn
Essay Preview: Adultism in Catcher in the Rye & Huckleberry Finn
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The theme of adulthood soaks the texts of both The Catcher in the Rye and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, two of the most acclaimed American novels in history. In The Catcher in The Rye, Holden Caulfield is leading a melodramatic struggle into adulthood. The fact that Holden is resistant to growing up is evident throughout the text. Huck, on the other hand, is a child. He is open minded, innocent, and carefree. Though his situation is a much more strenuous one than seen in most adults lives, he seems to handle his circumstances with ease.
Salinger creates an extremely dismal view of the adult life. This is the reason that Holden is constantly jumping over the line form adulthood, and back into childhood. Holden believes very deeply that adults are hypocritical, shallow, ostentatious, and idiotic. He describes all of these feelings into one word that he uses continually. Holden sees the adult world as just a bunch of phonies. He also determines that the adults are so phony, that they can not even see their own phoniness. Holden is constantly searching for a pure untainted adult, and all he can find of that description are children; children like his forever young dead brother Allie, his younger sister Phoebe, and Jane Gallagher who he remembers as “keeping all her kings in the back row”. He expresses his hatred for the phony world in describing his disgust in the phrase “glad to have met you” and how it had become almost automatic for people to say it, whether they meant it or not creating the phoniness aspect of adulthood that Holden so often alludes to.
He is trying to survive the transition into the adult world, one that should have happened in his prep schools. The fact that he fails out of all three of them is just more evidence that he is not ready to be an adult. He is too young to be taken seriously by adults, but too sensitive to be understood by his peers. Holden is trying to make the merge onto the highway of adulthood, and inevitably, he crashes.
Holden tells us extremely bluntly the he likes the museum because it never changes. The images are frozen. He also mentions that he is troubled by the fact that he has changed every time he returns to them. The museum represents the world Holden wishes he could live in, a world where nothing ever changes, where everything is simple, and more importantly, understandable.
One of the more famous metaphors in the book describes completely just how lost Holden really is. The duck pond is a metaphor for his life and those around him. Holden is the ducks, and everyone else is the fish. The key to this metaphor is that Holden is lost. He does not know where to go. He has no idea where the ducks go in the winter. Does someone help them, or do they get there by themselves? The fish (people) know where they need to be. They have their home. Holden is just a teenager like so many of us, trying to find his way. There is nowhere for him to go, nowhere he fits in society. So what happens? Holden has a mental breakdown.
Huckleberry Finn is a completely different character. He is probably the polar opposite of Holden Caulfield, because he is much surer of himself. He is constantly leaning in to adulthood, making decisions that could change peoples lives, and he doesnt think anything of it. Ironically, the entire book suggests that even though he lacks in a family and, and having a responsible adult to formally raise him, he still makes better decisions than many of the adults in the novel.
The morals that Huck conveys are extremely pertinent to the fact that he is a