Holden Caulfield’s Quest Term Papers

The journey of Holden Caulfield, the main character of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, is called a quest that takes him outside society. Due to the writer’s description the reader gets to know the reasons why Holden seems to be so intolerant and eventually estranged from the world in Catcher in the Rye. It is apparent that Holden Caulfield’s language point to a person much older. There is an impression that he is completely disappointed in the life he is imprisoned in and would seem to blame much, if not all, of that dissatisfaction on what he regards as the artificiality of the adult world. Salinger admits that Caulfield’s efforts to expose weak points of the adult world and to keep the innocence untouched would have been acceptable by a small child. The apprehension that is displayed by Caulfield is characterized by the predictable mutinous behavior of youth, which nevertheless has a depth that should be saved for the much older or those who have experienced and had to deal with the world’s problems directly. Still, Salinger states that the main character of Catcher in the Rye does not really hate adults and their “adulteries”. While he seems far more tolerant of the apparent shortcomings of his young peers, in the end he shows that he has a genuine compassion for the adults that he has methodically ridiculed throughout.