- Position‹2 of 5›
- The Catcher in the Rye is about death
- Argument1 of 2›
Allie Caulfield
Holden Caulfield is still grieving over the death of his younger brother, Allie.
The argument
Holden Caulfield is traumatized by the death of his younger brother Allie, who died four years previously of leukemia. What establishes the depth of the wound is not the death itself but Holden's response to it: he believes it is unjust, and he mentions to readers that he wishes he would have died instead of Allie. That is not ordinary mourning but a judgement about who should have survived, and it places Holden's own continued life under a shadow the novel never lifts. The book also records how the grief expressed itself at the time. At the time of Allie's death, Holden mentions, he was almost "psychoanalyzed" because he was breaking windows, and the episode is legible to readers in a way it is not to Holden himself. He does not present it as grief; he presents it as something that happened. What the scene shows is a boy with no means of releasing what he feels, and it is clear to readers that he is grieving over his brother and does not know how to outlet his emotions in a healthy way. That failure is why Allie functions as more than background. Throughout the novel Holden continues to mention Allie to readers, returning to him at moments with no obvious connection to him, which is how a book marks an event as unfinished rather than past. His death was greatly influential and is presented as a cause of Holden's mental illness rather than as one episode among others in his history. Read this way, the novel's subject is not adolescence with a bereavement somewhere behind it, but the death itself and the effects that continue to work on the narrator, which is why The Catcher in the Rye can be said to be about death.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Even though Holden mentions Allie multiple times, death is not the main theme of the novel. None of the characters die, and Holden is more focused on his depressive feelings than traumatizing deaths from the past. Death is important in The Catcher in the Rye, but it is only a factor in the overall plot of the novel.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P3] Death is only a factor in the background of The Catcher in the Rye.