Surviving Childhood:
Trauma and Maturation in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye,
S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, and Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of
Being a Wallflower
Mémoire
Aurélie Roy
Maîtrise en littératures d’expression anglaise
Maître ès arts (M.A.)
Québec, Canada
© Aurélie Roy, 2017
Surviving Childhood:
Trauma and Maturation in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye,
S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, and Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of
Being a Wallflower
Mémoire
Aurélie Roy
Sous la direction de:
Jean-‐Philippe Marcoux, directeur de recherche
Résumé
Ce mémoire de maîtrise propose une étude détaillée des répercussions sociales et psychologiques des évènements traumatiques sur le développement de l’enfant en utilisant trois Bildungsromane importants, The Catcher in the Rye de J.D. Salinger, The Outsiders de S.E. Hinton et The Perks of Being a Wallflower de Stephen Chbosky. En me basant sur les études de Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Ronald Granofsky, Dominick LaCapra, Dori Laub et Judith Lewis Herman, je démontre que les expériences traumatiques ont des effets contradictoires, mais indissociables sur l’évolution psychologique de l’enfant, à savoir de ralentir et d’accélérer le passage de l’enfance au monde adulte. J’explique que Holden Caulfield, Ponyboy Curtis et Charlie font preuve de comportements qui dévoilent la paralysie que peuvent entraîner les traumatismes psychologiques et qui peut forcer l’enfant à demeurer immature et innocent. Ensuite, j’illustre que ces mêmes expériences traumatiques, et l’acceptation de celles-ci peuvent finir par pousser l’enfant à brusquement atteindre la maturité. Ce mémoire souligne également l’importance du témoignage dans la guérison et dans l’éventuel passage de l’enfance à l’âge adulte. Considérant son omniprésence dans les romans pour jeunes adultes, le témoignage et ses ramifications seront analysés dans chaque chapitre. Au fil des trois chapitres, j’analyse chaque roman de façon indépendante, j’évalue la réaction de chaque personnage face aux expériences traumatiques et j’établis la nomenclature et les liens qui permettent une conversation entre les trois romans. Bien que les trois œuvres étudiées proposent différents modèles de réponses psychologiques aux traumatismes, chaque roman entre en dialogue avec l’autre. L’objectif de ce mémoire est donc d’offrir de nouvelles perspectives sur les trois histoires, tout en démontrant les corrélations qui les unissent et qui contribuent à la compréhension de chaque œuvre. Ainsi, ce mémoire se veut un outil pour établir une conception globale du rôle des expériences traumatiques dans la littérature pour jeunes lecteurs.
Abstract
This thesis examines the psychological and social repercussions of trauma on a child’s maturation process using three landmark novels of the Bildungsroman genre, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, and Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Grounding my analysis on the findings of trauma theorists Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Ronald Granofsky, and Dominick LaCapra, and psychiatrists Dori Laub and Judith Lewis Herman, I demonstrate that trauma can occupy two contradictory but inextricably linked functions in the maturation process, that of both hindering and catalyzing a child’s coming-of-age. I demonstrate that Holden Caulfield, Ponyboy Curtis, and Charlie all display behaviours that suggest the paralyzing nature of trauma and its initial ability to prevent the child from growing up. I then argue that trauma, or the acceptance of one’s traumatic past, has the potential to accelerate the maturation process. My study also highlights the importance of the testimonial process in the recovery from trauma and the character's ensuing maturity. Because of the omnipresence of testimony in young people’s literature, its ramifications and implications are explored in each chapter of this thesis. Through the use of close reading, I study each work independently, evaluate each character’s individual response to trauma, and establish the thematic vocabulary and the interlinks that allow a conversation between the three novels. Although the studied works propose different types of traumatic negotiation and response, each novel is dialogically linked with the other. This thesis offers new readings of each novel, while establishing insightful comparisons between the three works. The intent of this thesis is therefore to contribute to the assessment of each narrative and to a general understanding of the role of trauma in young people’s literature.
Table of Contents
Résumé ... iii Abstract ... iv Table of Contents ... v Epigraph ... vi Acknowledgements ... vi Introduction ... 1 Thesis Topic ... 2State of the Question ... 4
Argument ... 5
Outline of Chapters ... 6
Theoretical Framework ... 7
Methodology ... 11
Review of the Literature ... 12
Chapter 1 – “If you really want to hear about it”: Alienation, Incommunicability, and the Protection of Innocence in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye ... 17
Chapter 2 – Staying Gold: At the Intersections of Self and Other, of Virtue and Toughness, and of Innocence and Maturity in S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders ... 37
Part 1: A Traumatic Social Environment ... 39
Part 2: Traumatic Losses ... 47
Chapter 3 – “And in that moment, I swear we were infinite”: Passivity and the Dynamics of Power in Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower ... 57
Conclusion ... 78
Works Cited ... 85
Epigraph
“A child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to a declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts.” -William Wordsworth, “Michael”
“The child sees everything is a state of newness … Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a child absorbs form and color.” -Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life”
"Becoming a child again is what is impossible. That's what you have a legitimate reason to be upset over. Childhood is the most valuable thing that's taken away from you in life, if you think about it.” - Heather O’Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr. Jean-Philippe Marcoux for his unwavering support over the last two years. This thesis would not have been possible without his availability, enthusiasm, and guidance. Je tiens à remercier mes parents, Johanne et Lucien, ainsi que ma grande sœur Karel, pour leur amour, leur support, leurs encouragements et leur amitié, sans quoi la rédaction de ce mémoire perdrait tout son sens. Finalement, merci à Pierre-Luc, mon amoureux, mon partenaire, mon meilleur ami. Merci d’avoir prêté oreille à tous les questionnements et inquiétudes soulevés par ce projet. Merci de croire en moi, sans faute, même quand je n’y arrive pas moi-même. Ton amour et ton respect me donnent de la force, et ton soutien inconditionnel rayonne derrière chaque page et chaque mot de ce mémoire.
To Holden, Ponyboy, and Charlie. To all the children out there who, like me, have felt the everlasting presence of these three characters. Who, like me, know that stories like these need to be told. And who, like me, need to believe in the beauty, the value, and the immortality
of childhood.
Introduction
Thesis Topic
In the second half of the twentieth century, young people’s literature became increasingly concerned with the effects of trauma on protagonists. Children’s books addressing death and war date back to the nineteenth century, but as Kenneth B. Kidd points out, most do not “portray death as a destabilizing event” and “do not emphasize the psychological toll of war, death, or genocide” (182). 1 The proliferation of stories about the Holocaust and its aftermath is accountable for the rise of traumatic narratives for children and young adults (Kidd, Freud 181). The need to address the atrocity of the Holocaust emerged as a means of working through the global trauma that followed the Second World War. The horrors of the Holocaust subjected countless children to such a traumatic reality that the attempt at shielding them from trauma proved ultimately futile: “Presumably the exposure model became necessary because we no longer have the luxury of denying the existence of or postponing the child’s confrontation with evil” (Kidd, “‘A’ is for Auschwitz” 120-121). Rather than avoiding difficult subjects in their novels, several authors thus made trauma a recurring trope in young people’s literature.
Although the Holocaust is a common theme in young people’s trauma narratives, other subject matters include the loss of one’s object of affection, sexual abuse, divorce, school bullying, death, or any undesired and troubling experience that can disrupt a child’s normal life. 2 Given the various events that can potentially traumatize a child during the construction of his identity, young people’s literature is now “the most rather than the least appropriate forum for trauma work” (Kidd, Freud 181).3 In fact Katharine Capshaw Smith argues that since children are usually symbols of innocence in literature, their ability to
1 Kenneth B. Kidd’s work on trauma and children’s literature (in particular Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature and “‘A’ is for Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, Trauma Theory, and
the ‘Children’s Literature of Atrocity’”) has been very valuable for the entirety of this thesis. This thesis will expand on Kidd’s critical work and will attempt to answer to his request that people should “enrich” (Freud 205) his findings by providing other dimensions to his account of trauma in children’s literature.
2 I use the term “young people” to refer generally to both children and young adults. As such, young people’s
literature includes children’s literature and young adult literature, which are different. For example, I consider Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are to be a picture book intended for children and Hinton’s The
Outsiders to be a young adult novel. In my introductory remarks, I discuss how the Holocaust and other
traumatic events have found their way to young people’s literature because I wish to emphasize the presence of trauma not only in young adult literature, but also in children’s literature.
3 In the interest of simplicity, I use the masculine pronouns when referring to children or trauma victims,
although, of course, I also refer to girls and women. This decision also makes particular sense in light of the fact that the three protagonists from the chosen works are males.
overcome traumatic experiences generates hope in child and adult readers alike. Smith infers that children who are survivors of trauma “offer adults spiritual advice in how to triumph over pain through simple, honest, essential values like love, trust, hope, and perseverance” (116). Children and adolescent novels that address trauma are significant because they typically provide a hopeful conclusion to an otherwise mournful tale, thereby conveying to the readers who may be coping with a traumatic event that there are ways to survive.
The three texts to be studied in this thesis are landmarks in the Bildungsroman genre and present different ways in which a young person might react to traumatic experiences. J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951 and is unavoidable when undertaking a study of American coming-of-age novels. Its legacy in young people’s literature is indisputable as it is considered “the beginning point not so much of adolescent literature but of adolescent literature as a case writing about troubled youth” (Kidd, Freud 169). Salinger’s Holden Caulfield defined the figure of the vulnerable and immature young teenager subjected to the fears and anxieties that trauma may cause. Holden reacts to the trauma of his brother’s premature passing by rebelling against his academic institution, by desperately refusing to grow up, and by rejecting the hypocrisy of the adult world. The complexity of Holden’s character lies in his attitude, which might, at first glance, seem only that of an unruly teenager when, in reality, it is deeply rooted in the loss of his brother.
S.E. Hinton published The Outsiders in 1967 when she was a teenager and considered that the reading material for young people in the 1960s did not reflect their frequently violent reality. Wanting to offer young readers stories that were not “15 years behind their times” (Hinton qtd. in Cart 45), Hinton set out to write a novel in which the protagonist, Ponyboy Curtis, suffers from the trauma of his brutal environment and the deaths of his two friends. 4 Although scholars disagree as to which novel first introduced the genre of Young Adult literature, The Outsiders is often considered as being one of the first works of the
4 Ponyboy, the protagonist of The Outsiders, is part of a street gang called the Greasers. The Greasers’ rivalry
with another gang called the Socs puts Ponyboy in danger as the threat of being attacked at any moment constantly looms over him.
tradition.5 Regardless, the novel’s innovative combination of romance, realism, and naturalism (Kidd 170) has made The Outsiders an important work “in the evolution of young adult literature” (Cart 27) and one of the most important works written for young people.
Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower was published in 1999, three decades after The Outsiders. Although its protagonist Charlie shares characteristics with his predecessors, his narrative voice is different due to the fact he tells his story through letters that he composes and sends to an unrevealed recipient. Charlie was deeply traumatized as a child when his Aunt Helen sexually abused him, the memories of which he has entirely repressed. Chbosky’s epistolary novel presents a boy whose traumatic past defines his present as he attempts to understand the reasons behind his depressive state.
State of the Question
The similarities between The Catcher in the Rye, The Outsiders, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower have led scholars to establish critical connections between the three novels and their protagonists. Studies on The Outsiders often tend to compare Ponyboy to Holden. Kidd observes that Hinton’s narrative framework – which involves the protagonist telling his story “retrospectively, trying to heal wounds” (170) – is reminiscent of Holden’s need to discuss his past in order to heal from his brother’s death. Kidd avers that the protagonists’ experiences are similar, but that Ponyboy’s is “much more traumatic than Holden’s” (170, emphasis in original). Michael Cart also compares Hinton’s and Salinger’s novels, but maintains that The Catcher in the Rye is “a more viable model for the modern young adult novel than Hinton’s” (52). Cart justifies his argument by writing that The Outsiders suffers from “outrageous overwriting” and from a voice that fails to be credible (51). Cart considers that Holden’s “idiosyncratic, first-person voice” is more “quintessentially adolescent” (52) and authentic. Roberta Seelinger Trites comments that the title of Hinton’s The Outsiders would equally be appropriate for Salinger’s novel: for Trites, both novels present two young people whose need for universal truth can only be
5 Kidd infers that The Outsiders is a definite “contender for the title of first YA novel” (170). Other scholars
rather consider the Young Adult tradition to have begun with novels like Maureen Daly’s Seventeenth
Summer (1942) and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), which, through their characteristic use of the
met if they “quit being adolescents themselves [and] become more like the insiders, the adults” (79). As such, Trites identifies Holden and Ponyboy as two similar outsiders in essentially adult worlds.
Critical assessments of Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower also establish its similarities to The Catcher in the Rye and The Outsiders. Kidd’s observation that Charlie is a “more sedate version of Holden” (172) directly associates the two young protagonists. Angel Daniel Matos addresses The Catcher in the Rye in the first sentence of his article on Chbosky’s novel, thereby emphasizing the relationship between the two narratives: “Along with celebrated novels such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower … is approached by many as one of the most honest literary portrayals of teenage life within the last decades” (86). Later in his article, Matos also compares Chbosky’s novel to Hinton’s; Matos argues that Charlie, like Ponyboy, “resorts to the act of writing as a therapeutic tool for growth and cultivation” (90). Despite the fact that The Perks of Being a Wallflower is more recent and less studied than the other two novels, scholars have already highlighted the value of examining the novel in relation to The Catcher in the Rye and The Outsiders.
Argument
Eric Tribunella contends that trauma acts as the “fuel used to achieve the speed necessary for escaping the gravitational force of childhood” (Melancholia xi). Grounding my analysis on Tribunella’s claim, I propose that trauma also has the potential to achieve the opposite result in that it first and foremost hinders the social, emotional, and psychological developments of the child. Through a close reading of three coming-of-age novels, the present study will examine the effects of traumatic experiences on the development of the young victims. More specifically, I will determine whether trauma can serve two specific, albeit contradictory functions in young people’s literature, that of being both a paralyzing force and a catalyst of the maturation process. In light of these two possible functions of trauma, I will be faced with an initial question: can traumatic events both impede and induce the transition from childhood to adulthood in The Catcher in the Rye, The Outsiders, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower? By analysing their protagonists’ developments, it will be possible to assess whether the numbing and catalyzing functions of
trauma, though contradictory, are inextricably linked and both shape the individuals in important ways.
Outline of Chapters
Chapter one of this thesis revolves around Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Holden’s traumatic loss. I will argue that Holden’s depression and alienation from society do not merely reflect adolescence’s “swings into and out of rationality” (Shaw 99), as several Salinger scholars including Peter Shaw would have it. I instead propose a reading of the novel that acknowledges Holden’s alienation as a direct effect of his brother’s premature death. I will ground my assessment of Holden’s inability to connect with others in Judith Lewis Herman’s contention that a victim whose cries for help are not answered at the time of the traumatic event might develop “a sense of alienation, of disconnection [which] pervades every relationship, from the most intimate familial bonds to the most abstract affiliations of community” (52). I will rely on different trauma theorists, such as Ronald Granofsky, Anne Whitehead, Shoshana Felman, and Dori Laub, to explore Holden’s inability to mature. In the second half of the chapter, I will examine the ways in which Holden’s recovery from trauma, which occurs later in the novel, finally propels him into adulthood.
My second chapter focuses on Hinton’s The Outsiders and contains two sections. While the first section studies the impact of Ponyboy’s traumatic environment on his inability to mature, the second section focuses on how the deaths of his friends force him into adulthood. In the first section, I suggest that the everyday violence that Ponyboy encounters traumatizes him and prevents him from understanding other people. According to Jean Piaget’s concept of childhood egocentrism, Ponyboy’s attitude is not that of a fourteen-year-old boy, but rather of a much younger child. I also make use of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection to explain how Ponyboy’s trauma leads to his inability to negotiate the self in terms of the Other, which prevents him from acquiring maturity. The second section of the chapter addresses the symbolic roles of Dallas and Johnny, Ponyboy’s friends whose deaths he tragically witnesses. More specifically, I will argue that Ponyboy learns from his friends’ deaths and absorbs the strength that each one represents. By retaining Johnny’s virtue and consideration for others, Ponyboy learns to take others’ points
of view into account. Then, by adopting Dallas’s toughness, Ponyboy becomes fully equipped to face the violence of his environment without letting it traumatize him. Whereas the first section of this chapter will demonstrate the numbing capacity of trauma, the second section will validate trauma’s possible catalyzing impact on a child’s maturation.
In my third chapter, I will argue that Charlie’s striking inability to mature is a direct result of his sexual abuse experienced as a boy. I will ground my analysis on Trites’s Disturbing the Universe to assess how different notions of power are at play in The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I will suggest that Aunt Helen’s abuses of Charlie deprived him of personal power as a child, which has left him unable to develop a normal sense of agency later in his life. Charlie’s passivity is inextricably linked to his inability to grow up; because he lacks the personal power that he needs to adopt an active role in his own life, he misses out on the normal teenage experiences that would allow him to grow into a well-functioning and mature young adult. A thorough assessment of Charlie’s interpersonal relationships will allow me to demonstrate how Charlie’s trauma-induced passivity reveals his immaturity. In the second half of the chapter, I claim that Charlie retrieves, through reading and writing, the power that has been taken from him in his early childhood. After Charlie retrieves the repressed memories of his sexual abuse and takes control over them, his maturation process unfolds rapidly and he emerges a well-balanced young man.
Theoretical Framework
In his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud explains the psychological effects of traumatic experiences by comparing the human mind to a “living organism in its most simplified possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation” (20). The surface of the organism hardens with each stimulus that it faces, until it develops a “crust” that acts as a protective shield, so solid that normal stimulation can never break through and modify the configuration of the vesicle. However, when particularly destructive and unnatural stimuli hit the protective shield, it is unable to hold and the inside matter – in this case, the mind – is severely damaged. Therefore, the traumatic experience breaks the shield that had been protecting the mind, which is why the victim is unable to respond normally to these troubling events. Considering that a child’s “protective shield” typically has only faced a small number of
stimuli, it is possible to imagine that his “vesicle” is particularly vulnerable to traumatic events. At the beginning of my analysis of each novel, I identify the irregular stimulus – the traumatic event – that breaks the protagonist’s protective shield and leaves him forever changed.
In her highly influential Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth notes that the term “trauma” originally referred to “an injury inflicted on a body” (3). She adds that the term, in its later usage, is rather “understood as a wound not upon the body but upon the mind” (3). According to Caruth, Freud and other psychiatrists agree on the notion that trauma’s capacity to disturb the mind’s experience of “time, self, and the world” (4) is not as easily treatable as a physical wound. Trauma instead implies an experience that occurred too soon and unexpectedly, and at a time when the victim’s mind could not grasp and understand the extent of the event (4). Caruth defines trauma not as the single violent or troubling experience that happens to a victim, but “rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on” (4). The complexity of trauma lies in the fact that its effect involves not only the wound itself, but also the victim’s inability to assimilate and to assess the reality of the traumatic event.
This thesis explores the ways in which the three selected novels address the complexity of trauma and its impact on young characters. As such, my analysis will require the use of psychoanalytic theory in order to study the protagonists’ psychological growth in light of traumatic events. I will thus rely on different works that pertain to psychoanalytical studies on trauma. My three chapters make use of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. This highly influential work examines the different manifestations of trauma and establishes useful links between trauma literature and psychoanalysis. Testimony offers supporting evidence on trauma’s ability to hinder a child’s maturation process; Felman contends that trauma victims are unable to develop, remaining in a stagnant state due to their overwhelming fear that “fate will strike again” (67). The authors also believe that a traumatic event takes place “outside the parameters of ‘normal’ reality, such as causality, sequence, place and time”
(69). Because there is neither a real beginning nor clear end to the trauma, the victim feels as though he is forever trapped inside the memory of the event.
Felman and Laub’s study of the role of testimony in the recovery from trauma is particularly relevant to this thesis, as all three protagonists grow through the act of telling their story to a witness. The authors note that by sharing his traumatic memories with an “addressable other” (68), the victim allows for that other person to confirm the realness of the past. Only through this process, which consists in a transfer of knowledge onto “another outside oneself” (69), can the victim accept the traumatic event.
In this thesis, I further ground my analysis on psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, in which she defines the nature of traumatic violence and the possible stages of recovery. Specifically, Herman’s theories contribute to my evaluation of Holden’s initial inability to connect with others as a consequence of his traumatic past and a cause of his stunted maturation process. Herman believes that the trauma victim can only heal once he feels that his cries for help are heard, without which he cannot define the parameters of the self in relation to the world. Like Felman and Laub, Herman stresses the importance of the testimony in the recovery process. Through the testimony, the victim “tells [his story] completely, in depth and in detail. This work of reconstruction actually transforms the traumatic memory, so that it can be integrated into the survivor’s life story” (175). As a result, the trauma is no longer an incomprehensible event that the victim is unable to assimilate. By giving a detailed account of his story, the victim comes to know his trauma well enough to assimilate it and accept its occurrence. The ramifications of the testimony and its necessity in the recovery process – and, as this thesis aims to demonstrate, in the maturation process – will be further developed in each chapter.
This thesis also draws on Ronald Granofsky’s The Trauma Novel: Contemporary Symbolic Depictions of Collective Disaster, in which the author avers that the trauma novel presents a “quest for identity in the face of a brutal assault on the sense of self” (18). This quest, which Granofsky calls the “trauma response,” can be broken down into three stages: regression, fragmentation, and reunification. Granofsky’s theorization of the trauma response will be particularly useful given the purpose of this thesis, as he explicitly mentions that trauma victims tend to regress “to a primitive and nonresponsible state of
development which will relieve anxiety” (108). Granofsky suggests that victims tend to revert to a childlike state as a means to avoid the emotional pain that the trauma generates. This is in keeping with my hypothesis, although the child does not regress to a childlike state, but is rather unable to escape it.
Granofsky crafts his definition of the regression stage by considering the work of child psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, who suggests that such “setbacks” (qtd. In Granofsky 108) are part of the stressful maturation process: “In intervening periods of stress and scarcity, the individual seeks for comfort again in the ‘childish’ notion that he and his place of abode are the center of the universe” (Bettelheim 51). The trauma victim, in a search for this simple and childish conception, will revert to childhood, which delays the maturation process and prevents the victim’s childlike irrational thought from evolving into rational thought (Granofsky 108).
Fragmentation, the second stage of the trauma response, “often takes the form of a polarization of society” in which “everything is ‘black’ or ‘white’ with no shades of ‘grey’” (108-109). Granofsky explains that this “dichotomous splitting of experience” (109) is a way for the victim to preserve his worldview as it was before the trauma. This theory implies that a traumatized child retains the worldview he had when he was younger, which explains why he cannot let go of his immature attitude even at an age when he should mature, or be able to do so.
Reunification is the final stage of the trauma response that Granofsky establishes in his book. He defines this stage as the moment when the victim finds a way to “reconcile the traumatic experience with whatever else he or she knows of life” (110). Like Caruth, Granofsky acknowledges that the victim’s inability to address his own trauma lies in the fact that he is not equipped to know it completely. Granofsky, like Herman, also notes that the only way to heal from a traumatic event is to know it well, which is what the stage of reunification implies. He adds that knowing the extent of one’s trauma is necessary in order to “re-enter the process of maturation after the stages of regression and fragmentation” (110). Because all three stages make particular sense in the study of trauma in young people’s literature, Granofsky’s theory is therefore an important component of this thesis’s argumentation. As such, the several theories that I will use will engage in a dialogue that
will allow me to assess the ways in which the three novels address the several psychological and social repercussions of trauma.
Methodology
Caruth mentions that there is no single way to study trauma fiction: she writes that the approach to trauma narratives faces “the difficulty of listening and responding to traumatic stories in a way that does not lose their impact, that does not reduce them to clichés or turn them all into versions of the same story” (Trauma vii). The fact that victims react to traumatic events in different ways calls for the necessity to assess each case individually. This explains why each chapter of this thesis focuses on one single novel.
My analysis of The Catcher in the Rye, The Outsiders, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower will rely on a close reading of each of the three novels in order to study the characters’ developments from childhood to adulthood, as well as the ways in which trauma both impairs and eventually fosters their maturity. Close reading as a method of literary analysis will allow me to examine the main themes, the characters, the form, and the important scenes of each novel. I will therefore use this methodology to study how the effects of trauma are present in these aspects of the novels.
To assist me in my close reading, I will engage with a number of critical readings of the novels. As the majority of these works does not consider or focus on trauma, I will use them to complete my own assessment of the effects of trauma in the novels. By opting for a combination of psychoanalytic theories and critical analysis of the novels, I hope to offer new readings of Salinger’s, Hinton’s, and Chbosky’s narratives. Although scholars have established the similarities between the three protagonists, the novels will be studied together for the first time in this thesis. Analyzing them within one work will allow a better understanding of the ways in which trauma theory can be applied to young people’s narratives of traumatic loss, whether it is the loss of a brother, the loss of close friends, or the loss of personal power.
Review of the Literature
In this section, I provide a brief overview of the critical works that have shaped my understanding of the three novels. For the sake of concision, I address only the most important sources, but I should note that there exists a wealth of criticism on The Catcher in the Rye and The Outsiders.
In his article “The Language of The Catcher in the Rye,” Donald P. Costello explores how language contributes to defining Holden. Although Holden’s use of language is very typical of teenagers of his day, he manages to make it his own, which contributes to his uniqueness as a character. His insistence on certain words or phrases is taken to such an "overpowering degree" (Costello 33) that it strongly distinguishes him from his peers. For example, Holden’s inability to communicate and his fear that people will not want to hear about his pain are expressed in idiosyncrasies, such as finishing his sentences with “and all” or “or anything.” This demonstrates Holden’s desperate need to say more despite his belief that people do not what to hear what he has to say. Another example is his "idiosyncrasy of insistence" (33) to reinforce his sincerity; Holden uses phrases like “I really did” or “it really was” to distance himself from the deceitful people that Holden despises. Holden’s need for people to believe in his truthfulness is obvious in his speech.
In 1961, Carl F. Strauch published an article titled “Kings in the Back Row: Meaning Through Structure – A Reading of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye,” which is often considered one of the most important critical works on the novel. Half a century later, Strauch’s essay still provides relevant insights into contemporary assessments of The Catcher in the Rye. In his analysis, Strauch addresses, among other aspects, Holden’s immaturity, his desire to protect the innocent, and his alienation. Strauch argues that Holden creates a “private world of innocence” (7), in which belong all the innocent animals and children that he wishes to protect. This notion is of particular interest to this study, as I rely on Strauch’s argument to suggest that Holden’s inability to connect with others is a result of his traumatic experience.
In “Incommunicability in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye,” Charles H. Kegel takes a psychological approach to the novel and argues that Holden’s inability to communicate is
at the heart of his problems. Kegel considers Holden’s narrative as a quest to communicate with his fellow men, which he seems unable to achieve. Although Holden’s main challenge lies in his inability to understand the adults in his life, he is also unable to get through to people his own age. According to Kegel, Holden needs someone to talk to him honestly and to listen to what he needs to say. Holden’s inability to communicate with others is symbolized by the numerous phone calls and messages that are never completed. Kegel points out that Holden feels the need to give “somebody a buzz” (Salinger 59) on fifteen separate occasions, but he only dials a number four times, and each time does not bring him much comfort (Kegel 189). Furthermore, Kegel identifies the carousel scene as the moment when Holden reveals his newfound maturity. By refusing to ride the carousel with Phoebe, Holden finally allows himself to give up on childhood and assumes his new role as a young adult.
Edwin Haviland Miller’s reading of Salinger’s novel in “In Memoriam: Allie Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye” informs mine in that it also acknowledges Allie’s death as the traumatic event that prevents Holden from maturing. I therefore draw on Miller’s explanations in my own analysis of Salinger’s novel. Miller comments on the several events that occur, from Holden’s departure from his school to his reunion with Phoebe at the end of the novel. According to Miller, Holden’s behaviour suggests that his alienation from society is deliberate and that his inability to connect with others is due to people’s unwillingness to recognize the impact of Allie’s death. Miller’s essay is plot-oriented and does not engage with psychoanalytic theory; as such, I will explore some of his arguments using the findings of several trauma theorists.
Other critics approach Salinger’s novel from a psychoanalytical perspective. In his 1974 article “The Psychological Structure of The Catcher in the Rye,” James Bryan points out that no critic “accepted Salinger’s invitation … to participate in a full-fledged psychoanalytical reading” (1065). Bryan’s text thus accepts Salinger’s invitation and offers a relatively original analysis of the novel. Although Bryan directly links Holden’s neurosis to his brother’s death, the essay focuses on Holden’s supposedly repressed sexuality, and not on his stunted maturation. Bryan’s study is nevertheless relevant to this thesis, as I read Holden’s immature approach to sexuality as a sign of his inability to grow.
Jay Daly’s book Presenting S.E. Hinton is one of the rare extensive works on Hinton and her novels. Daly’s second chapter focuses on The Outsiders and is particularly of use for this thesis. Before delving into an analysis of the main themes and characters of the novel, Daly describes the novel’s critical reception and its influence on what has since been called “The New Realism” in young people’s literature. 6 Daly’s study of Hinton’s characters will be useful to my examination of Ponyboy’s development and of the impact of Dallas and Johnny on Ponyboy’s maturity. Furthermore, Daly scrutinizes the themes of The Outsiders and offers interesting insights on Robert Frost’s poem and the question of innocence that the poem denotes. I will therefore rely on Daly’s assessment of the characters and the themes to construct part of my own analysis of The Outsiders.
In his book titled From Romance to Realism: 50 Years of Growth and Change in Young Adult Literature, Michael Cart presents the different novels that played a significant role in the evolution of young adult literature and recognizes The Outsiders as an important text in the genre. In his section on Hinton, Cart discusses her novels and the context in which she wrote them. Cart therefore provides valuable insight on the motives behind the use of violence in Hinton’s first novel, which contributes to my assessment of Ponyboy’s violent and traumatic environment. Furthermore, Cart offers a brief analysis of the novel and even engages in a comparison between The Outsiders and The Catcher in the Rye. He draws pertinent links between the novels as far as themes, narrative voice, and reception are concerned. Cart’s book is thus a helpful resource in the study of Hinton’s fiction and of young adult literature in general.
Tribunella’s Melancholia and Maturation: The Use of Trauma in American Children’s Literature offers a complete survey of contemporary young people’s fiction that deals with traumatic experiences. His third chapter, which is devoted to Hinton’s The Outsiders and That Was Then, This is Now, addresses the relationship between knowing and unknowing, and its importance in Ponyboy’s maturation. He convincingly argues that
6 Daly writes: “The term New Realism was added later, but the fear that books for teenagers were getting a
little too realistic for their own good was beginning to be heard more and more frequently during the time after the publication of The Outsiders… The New Realism, including The Outsiders, soon became a battleground for parents, teachers, librarians, and readers on both sides of the question” (15). Daly’s explanation adds an interesting dimension to the motives behind the publication of the novel, as Hinton herself argued that she wanted to publish a novel that realistically represented the violence in young people’s lives.
Ponyboy needs to find a balance between knowledge and ignorance in order to face his traumatic past and to grow up as a model young adult. Tribunella’s general claim is that the trauma induced by loss in the early stage of one’s life “generates the escape velocity of youth” (xi). In other words, the difficulty of loss propels the child into maturity.
In another work on The Outsiders, which is titled “Institutionalizing The Outsiders: YA Literature, Social Class, and the American Faith in Education,” Tribunella addresses the institutionalization of The Outsiders and its effects of its class critique on its audience. Tribunella examines the different ways in which Hinton portrays the traumatic and violent reality of youth in her story. He also argues in favor of the importance of teaching this novel in the classroom, despite its violent subject matter. He therefore views Ponyboy’s narrative as helpful for young and adult readers alike, and believes the novel is safe even for a young audience. As such, Tribunella and Ponyboy both believe that sharing one’s traumatic experiences with others is a valuable process for the writer and the readers alike. Although he does not address the question of trauma, Dan Shi is the first critic to associate The Outsiders with Jean Piaget’s theory of childhood egocentrism in his article “De-egocentricity and Socialization: A Study of Hinton’s The Outsiders.” Shi details Piaget’s stages of cognitive development and explains how Ponyboy’s egocentrism is suggestive of an immaturity that is inapt for a fourteen-year-old boy. Additionally, Shi theorizes a process that he calls “de-egocentricity,” which involves the gradual development of a child’s ability to understand others. 7 Shi writes that children “abandon their ego-centrism when communicating with each other, trying to appreciate others’ points of view and making themselves understood by others” (669). Shi equates “de-egocentricity” to maturation and argues that the two processes are inextricably linked. While I apply Piaget’s theories only to my assessment of Ponyboy, Shi offers a thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought- thought-
7 In my analysis of egocentrism in The Outsiders, I will not use Shi’s term “de-egocentricity,” even though I
do discuss the ways in which Ponyboy becomes less egocentric in the last pages of the novel. The reason why I refuse to use this term is that I consider the use of the prefix “de-” ambiguous. According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, although the prefix can be used to refer to something that reduces, it primarily defines something that does “the opposite of” (“De-”). Piaget makes it clear that while an adult’s egocentrism is different from that of a child in that an adult has the ability to understand others’ points of view, the adult is still egocentric in his own way. As such, I feel that it is contentious to use the prefix ” in
“de-egocentricity” as a reader’s first instinct would be to assume that a child becomes the opposite of egocentric as he grows up, which is not the case.
provoking analysis of other characters of The Outsiders – such as Cherry Valence and Randy the Greaser – and their own egocentrism. The present thesis is therefore indebted to Shi’s observations, as it uses them to demonstrate that Ponyboy’s immature attitude hints at the fact that his traumatic environment prevents him from growing up.
Angel Daniel Matos’s article “Writing Through Growth, Growth Through Writing” offers a pertinent analysis of Charlie’s development from a passive boy to a young adult who finds a way to “participate” (Chbosky 28) in and take control of his own life. Matos argues that Charlie’s letters provide a sense of detachment that allows him to “evaluate his own growth and identity” (88) and therefore understand his past. The author also examines the ways in which Charlie’s experiences – “drug use, masturbation, visits to the Rock Horror Picture Show, and exposure to different literatures” (93) – allow him to understand the world more clearly, and offer him a platform to take an active role in his life.
Amely Wasserman’s “The Epistolary in Young Adult Literature” examines the function of letter writing in Mega McCafferty’s Sloppy Firsts and Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Both protagonists are teenagers who are going through difficult times, and Wasserman argues that their letters express “the extent to which each is trapped within his or her own world and within his or her own skin” (48). Although Charlie changes as he writes his letters, Wasserman sees the process as a gradual one. Charlie keeps his role of observer and allows other people to “mold him into what they wish him to be” (51). He knows that he is different, and he only wants to become “normal” like the other children. However, Wasserman maintains that Charlie’s letters allow him to reflect on his own life from a distance, which forces him to realize that other people cannot live his life in his stead. This conclusion, which he reaches by writing his letters, leads to his taking charge of his own life, which allows him to leave his passive state.
Chapter 1 – “If you really want to hear about it”: Alienation,
Incommunicability, and the Protection of Innocence in J.D.
Allie Caulfield died of leukemia on July 18, 1946, when his family was in Maine for a vacation. His older brother Holden, thirteen years old at the time, slept in the garage and broke down under the weight of his grief: “I broke the goddam windows with my fist just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and I couldn’t do it” (Salinger 39). This passage demonstrates not only the intensity of Holden’s grief and his uncontrollable anger at being unable to save Allie, but also his resentment towards his brother for leaving him behind. Allie’s death is a deeply traumatic event that leaves Holden with feelings of guilt and powerlessness that still ail him four years later, when the narrative of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye takes place. Holden mentions that breaking the windows “was a very stupid thing to do, I’ll admit, but I hardly didn’t even know I was doing it, and you didn’t know Allie” (39). The belief that no one understands the effects of his trauma isolates Holden from other people, and this alienation contributes to the hindrance of his social and psychological growth.
Holden Caulfield is in a depressive state for the better part of the narrative. A number of Salinger critics such as Peter Shaw believe that Allie’s death, though tragic, is not the source of Holden’s neurosis. For instance, Shaw argues that Holden’s disturbed state is rather due to the “peculiar dynamics of adolescent psychology,” which is reminiscent of schizophrenia in its “swings into and out of rationality” (99). He asserts that Holden reacts to the difficult process of growing up, which is only worsened by his brother’s death: Shaw writes, “no single act or expression of his stands out as inexplicable without reference to Allie. His brother’s death exacerbates rather than constitutes Holden’s adolescent crisis” (100). Like the other characters from Salinger’s novel, Shaw fails to recognize that what troubles Holden is the death of his brother. I argue that rejecting the trauma of Allie’s demise as the source of Holden’s anguish is to overlook its effects on Holden and to underestimate its importance.
It is my contention that Holden’s immaturity and rebellion, the details of which will be exposed in this chapter, is a direct response to his brother Allie’s death. Other critics agree that the trauma of Allie’s premature passing is responsible for Holden’s attitude. For one, James Bryan identifies Allie’s death as “the event that may have brought on the trauma
behind all of [Holden’s] problems” (1065). Carl F. Strauch likewise maintains that Holden’s “withdrawal and aggression, guilt feelings, fantasies of mutilation, the death wish” lie mainly in “the death of his brother Allie” (50). He also adds that this traumatic experience has produced an intense neurosis that “includes feelings of insecurity” (57). Like critic E.H. Miller, I believe that Holden’s rebelliousness against his society is the “only means of dealing with his inability to come to terms with the death of his brother” (279), and not the other way around, as Shaw suggests.
That being said, although most critics acknowledge the influence of Allie’s death on his brother’s behaviour, the tragedy has seldom been the focus of the criticism. In fact, very little attention has been paid to Holden’s actual “trauma response,” a term Ronald Granofsky uses to designate the “quest for identity in the face of a brutal assault on the sense of self” (18). I propose a re-examination of The Catcher in the Rye by applying to Salinger’s novel a set of trauma theories put forward by Cathy Caruth, Judith Herman, Dori Laub, Ronald Granofsky, and Anne Whitehead. My assessment of the novel not only recognizes Allie’s death as the traumatic source of Holden’s neurosis, but also considers its influence on several aspects of Holden’s growth. Like E. H. Miller, I contend that Holden needs “to bury Allie before he can make the transition into adulthood” (279). Holden’s inability to accept Allie’s death perpetuates his trauma and leaves him unable to move forward.
It should be repeated at this point that the main purpose of this thesis is to verify the validity of two contradictory hypotheses about the effects of trauma; I aim to assess whether trauma can act both as a numbing force and a catalyst of the maturation process. For the majority of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden is unable to mature as adolescents his age would. As Miller points out, Holden was thirteen at the time of Allie’s death, and has not evolved since (279). Holden is very much aware of his immaturity, and does not seem bothered by it: “I’m seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I’m about thirteen” (Salinger 9). During his narrative, Holden “is emotionally still at the same age, although he has matured into a gangly six-foot adolescent” (Miller 279). If Holden can be insightful beyond his years, he also often acts and thinks like a child. For instance, his immaturity can be observed in his approach to sexuality: he sometimes feels “pretty horny” although he
admits that “sex is something I just don’t understand” (Salinger 63). When he hires a prostitute, he soon realizes that he is too nervous and thoroughly unprepared for intimacy. Scenes like this demonstrate that Holden is still an immature child. Unable to accept his brother’s death and to escape the effects of trauma, Holden finds himself unable and unwilling to grow.
My claim that young trauma victims are often unable to have normal social and psychological growth is supported by the second stage of Ronald Granofsky’s trauma response, regression. According to Granofsky, regression stems from immobilizing fear or overwhelming guilt (108). In this stage of the trauma response, victims regress “to a primitive and nonresponsible state of development which will relieve anxiety or guilt” (108). In trauma fiction, the regression stage often implies a return to childhood, a state that victims find comforting because of its simplicity and innocence. Unable to cope with his fear of death and the feeling of guilt that he feels for surviving when Allie did not, Holden enters a stage of regression that impedes his maturation process. Acting like he is “about thirteen” (Salinger 9) instead of seventeen offers a coping mechanism that, although ultimately unsuccessful, has the potential to lessen Holden’s feelings of guilt and sadness. His longing for the comfort of innocence explains why he does not only idealize childhood, but also seems unable and unwilling to escape it. His guilt is also a result of the possibility of growing up that he has and that Allie never will: because Allie died in innocence and will never get to grow into an adult, Holden feels guilty about moving on with his own life, which results in his regression. As long as Holden is unable to heal from the trauma of his brother’s death, he is trapped within what Granofsky identifies as the second stage of the trauma response.
The numbing capacity of trauma is partly due to trauma’s tendency to impose an inescapable state of mourning upon the victim. Laub suggests that trauma is “an event that has no beginning, no ending, no before, no during and no after” (Laub 69). Because trauma survivors face an “event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion,” they are denied closure and constantly feel “entrapped” by the traumatic event (69). As Holden was hospitalized for breaking his hand on the windows, he did not attend Allie’s funeral and was unable “to witness the completion of the life process” (Miller 280). Not having
been able to bury Allie alongside his family deprived Holden of the closure that he needed, which makes his brother’s death an event that has no real ending, and therefore continues in the present.
The extent of Holden’s trauma-induced depression is noticeable in his relationship with the society that surrounds him. Salinger scholars generally agree that The Catcher in the Rye offers a brutally honest commentary on the shallowness of the society of postwar America. Peter J. Seng writes that Holden is disturbed by a world which adults “have filled with phoniness, pretense, social compromise” (206). What Holden sees as he wanders through New York City and meets “phony bastard[s]” (Salinger 17) is a society that has no room for sensitive youngsters like himself. According to Strauch, Holden’s rejection of “the phony world of corrupt materialism” leads to the formation of a “private world of innocence” (7), which includes only children and animals who need protection. Just like he wishes he could be saved from the effects of trauma, Holden takes it upon himself to protect the innocents who have no one to look after them. In this private world, Holden could save the ducks from becoming homeless once the Central Park pond “gets all frozen over” (Salinger 60) and he could be the catcher in the rye, thereby stopping the unsuspicious children from falling into the dangerous abyss of adulthood and phoniness. Strauch, like most critics, therefore contends that Holden’s private world and his desire to protect the innocent are results of the inhospitality of society.
Although I agree that Holden’s estrangement from the world is partly due to the shallowness of society, I suggest that most critics have insufficiently emphasised the trauma of Allie’s death as a precursor to Holden’s alienation. In other words, Holden locking himself in his private world of innocence points to his desire for self-preservation in the face of his traumatic experience. Judith Lewis Herman argues that traumatic events tend to shatter “the sense of self that is formed and sustained in relations to others” (51), which can and often does sever the victim’s relationship with his family, friends, or community. Herman explains that victims’ first response to trauma is to call out for the person who represents a source of comfort and protection (52). When this cry is not answered, traumatized people’s sense of “basic trust” in the world is destroyed and they feel “abandoned, alone, cast out of the human and divine systems of care and protection
that sustain life” (52). When Allie died, Holden’s cry for help manifested itself in the destruction of the garage windows, which symbolizes his desire to break out of the suffocating effects of traumatic grief. However, what he was truly seeking as he did this was Allie, his own source of comfort and protection. As Allie evidently was not able to answer Holden’s plea for help, Holden developed “a sense of alienation, of disconnection [which] pervades every relationship, from the most intimate familial bonds to the most abstract affiliations of community” (52). Consequently, I contend that Holden’s rejection of society and his immersion in his “private world of innocence” (Strauch 7) are principally due to the rupture of his “basic trust” (Herman 52) after his cries for Allie’s comfort and protection were never answered.
According to Herman, traumatic events challenge the belief systems that make the human experience relevant (51). Because Holden’s trauma caused a “violation of human connection” (54), he finds himself utterly unable to communicate with others. The number of uncompleted phone calls symbolizes Holden’s incommunicability: Kegel points out that Holden feels the need to give “somebody a buzz” (Salinger 59) on fifteen separate occasions, but that he actually dials a phone number only four times, and each call does not bring him much comfort (Kegel 189). To Holden, others seem unwilling to communicate with him: this belief is demonstrated through the repeated use of sentences like “[p]eople never notice anything” (Salinger 9), “[h]e hardly ever listened to you when you said something” (10), and “[p]eople never believe you” (37). Kegel writes that Holden is “troubled with people who are not listening to what he says, who are talking only to be polite, not because they want to say something” (188). Holden believes that communication and what Herman calls the “human experience” (51) are entirely unrealizable.
Although Holden seems to be speaking to a specific “you” throughout the novel, it is never clear who the addressee is. It could be argued that Salinger’s vagueness on this matter was purposeful and was in fact used to represent Holden’s desire to be heard by someone or anyone. His belief that no one will care enough to listen only reinforces his need to share his narrative with an undisclosed “you,” no matter who that might be. Holden expresses his desire to share his trauma with the world through his confessional mode by repeating the phrases “if you really want to hear about it” (Salinger 1), the novel’s opening words, and “if
you want to know the truth” (46). In the first place, these characteristic expressions reveal Holden’s wish to remain authentic and honest, despite his concession that he is supposedly “the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life” (16). By insisting that what he says is the truth, he distances himself from the phony people that he seems to meet on every street corner. More importantly, these phrases denote distinct skepticism and uncertainty: Arthur Heiserman and James E. Miller, Jr. argue that the use of such expressions suggests that, “in the world of Holden Caulfield very few people do [really want to hear about it or want to know the truth]” (135). Consequently, Holden’s belief that no one is willing to listen despite his need to be understood is another aftereffect of the trauma of Allie’s death and of Holden’s subsequent isolation.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud establishes what he calls his theory of repetition compulsion, which holds that trauma victims unconsciously “repeat all of these unwanted situations and painful emotions” (Beyond Freud 15) through dreams, grim feelings, recurring memories, and hallucinations. 8 Holden’s recurring memories of Allie and his tendency to speak to his brother as though he were still alive demonstrate that he suffers from repetition compulsion. This involuntary impulse to repeat the traumatic event or the same emotional and psychological state forces the victims to remain in the past, and prevents them from moving forward: to use Anne Whitehead’s words, “repetition replays the past as if it was fully present and remains caught within trauma’s paralysing influence” (86). Whitehead’s statement supports the idea that Holden remains paralysed and is unable to accept his inevitable adulthood.
When “Old Sunny” (Salinger 98), a prostitute Holden hires in order to have someone to talk to, leaves his room, Holden feels depressed and seeks comfort in Allie’s memory. He starts talking out loud to his dead brother, telling him “to go home and get his bike and meet [Holden] in front of Bobby Fallon’s house” (98). This refers to an event of the past, in which a younger Holden forbids Allie to play with him because “he [is] a child” (99). Unable to accept his own cruelty to his brother and the missed opportunity to spend time
8 Freudianism made an impact on psychotherapy in the Fifties due to the trauma of the Second World War
and to the distress caused by the Cold War. It is therefore relevant to apply Freud’s theory to The Catcher in
the Rye, considering that its events take place in the late Forties and that its author fought in the Second World
with him, Holden keeps trying to make things right even after Allie’s death. Holden admits that he willingly invokes this memory quite often as a means of saving himself from his depression. Herman writes that “[e]ven when [reenactments] are consciously chosen, they have a feeling of involuntariness” (41). Instead of providing the temporary comfort Holden so desperately seeks, this somehow involuntary memory only seems to make him feel guilty and sorrowful.
Holden often feels troubled by the memory of his visits to Allie in the cemetery. He went to the graveyard “a couple of times” with his parents to “stick a bunch of flowers on old Allie’s grave” (155), but soon stopped going after it rained during two of his visits: “It was awful. It rained on his lousy tombstone, and it rained on the grass on his stomach. ... All the visitors could get in their cars and turn on their radios and all and then go someplace nice for dinner – all except Allie” (155-156). Significantly, Holden recalls this episode just as he convinces himself that he is about to die from pneumonia due to the cold. Unable to stand the idea of Allie being left alone in the cold and the rain when everyone else gets to be warm, he forces the same state upon himself by sitting on a park bench in the cold and picturing his own funeral. This memory reinforces Holden’s anguish at having to abandon Allie all alone in the cemetery.
Although it is possible for people to remember the dead with acceptance and peace, it is not Holden’s case. His memories of Allie, far from comforting him, accentuate his grief and guilt. As a result, Holden’s trauma does not reduce over time, and he is trapped in a miserable state of stasis. This is in keeping with Caruth’s argument that “the repetition of the traumatic experience in the flashback can itself be retraumatizing” (Unclaimed Experience 63). Therefore, every memory of Allie acts as a new traumatic event, which only worsens Holden’s situation. Caruth believes that these frequent flashbacks, which are closely linked to Freud’s concept of repetition compulsion, have a deeply destructive impact on the victim’s life (63). In Salinger’s novel, they both act as a hindrance of his maturation process and contribute to his inability to socialize.
Felman’s claim that trauma victims suffer from a “fear that fate will strike again” (67) helps in explaining Holden’s obsession with death. For most victims, this fear makes the recovery from trauma appear almost impossible. They feel that if fate does strike again,
