Examples Of Depression In Catcher In The Rye

Holden shows signs of depression throughout his entire story, however it seems to get progressively worse as it goes on. It seems to start after he gets kicked out of Pencey Prep with Holden saying things like, “I didn't like hearing him say that. It made me sound dead or something. It was very depressing” (Salinger 14). These early quotes about depression show that Holden, even if it's not very extreme, is sad and is thinking about depression. However, later in Holden’s story his depression gets worse and the drastic difference can easily be seen in this

Nineteen million American adults suffer from a major case of depression (Web MD). That is a staggering one in every fifteen people (2 in our classroom alone). Holden Caulfield is clearly one of those people. Depression is a disease that leads to death but is also preventable. Psychology, stressful events, and prescription drugs are causes of depression. Stressful events brought on Holden’s depression. Holden has been trying to withstand losing a brother, living with careless parents, and not having many friends. The Catcher in the Rye is a book that takes us through the frazzled life of Holden Caulfield, who appears to be just a regular teen. But by hearing his thoughts and through heart-wrenching events in the book, the reader learns that

Throughout Catcher in the Rye Holden Caulfield, a young boy who has recently been expelled from Pencey Prep, shows severe signs of depression that progress throughout the book. Although one may argue that the chapter in which Holden describes the suicide of James Castle is the peak of his depression, chapter 20 best exemplifies Holden’s severe depression by drowning his thoughts in alcohol, fantasizing his own death, funeral, and how his family would be affected if he died. During chapter 20 Holden’s drinking becomes excessive and is a coping mechanism for his depression. Holden starts to drown his thoughts in alcohol and use it as a coping mechanism for his depression. “I sat in that goddamn bar till around one o’clock or so getting drunk as a basard. I could

     Throughout life, an individual may endure emotionally and physically straining moments causing the person to become downhearted, and or irate. These feelings are normal, but may however become a problem when these feelings prohibit someone from living a ‘normal’ life. An estimated 5.2 million American adults ages 18 to 54, or approximately 3.6 percent of people in this age group in a given year, have PTSD (Narrow, Rae, Regier). This purpose of this report is to prove whether or not Holden Caulfield, the main character of J.D. Salingers’s book The Catcher In The Rye, is depressed.

Holden finds it almost normal to have recurring thoughts about suicide. Throughout the novel, Holden brings up scenarios of his defeat and even tells one of his schoolmates mothers that he has a brain tumor. This may be, because he thinks he’s better off with his brother, not forced to grow up in a society full of “phonies”. Holdens perception of adulthood makes him resilient to change, he’s focused on being real which in fact is sabotaging himself, by letting it control his life. He’s been negligent at school by not applying himself, failing classes, and ultimately getting kicked out of prep schools. Knowingly or not, Holden has been holding himself back, hoping to exempt himself from adulthood; which is not working in his favor as whether he accepts it or not, society will ultimately force him into adulthood. Holden experiences a push into adulthood with his encounter with Sunny the hooker. The encounter does not go as planned and once Holden dismisses Sunny, he becomes depressed, suicidal and turns to talking out loud to his dead brother Allie “I felt miserable. I felt depressed, you can’t imagine. What I did, I started talking, sort of out loud, to Allie” (Salinger 110). “Engaged in memories of Allie, lonely in his room, -so lonesome [... ] I almost wished I was dead" (p. 42), Holden sees himself in a Manhattan hotel room alone and overwhelmed in thought of -jumping out the window" ( p. 94).

Someone with issues like Holden struggle in school and the real world. Mental issues affect quite a few people throughout the world, in fact according to http://www.recognizetrauma.org/ 60% of adults have mental health problems because of traumatized childhoods. This website also indicates that a person that has gone through trauma is three times more likely to experience depression throughout their lifetime. Holden clearly feels alone and depressed when he describes, “How he was the only guy to go near James Castle I told you about when he was dead. I thought about all that stuff.

Depression is defined as a condition where a person feels very sad, hopeless, unimportant, and unable to live in a normal way, which is Holden’s personality in the book. It’s a very serious situation that many people go through and it takes an enormous toll on people. Many instances can cause depression and grieving the loss of someone is one of them. In the beginning, it seems like Holden is depressed because he is excluded from the people around him. Holden’s flashbacks and hallucinations, along with Phoebe reminding him that Allie is not coming back, show that his depression stems from him grieving the loss of Allie.

Teenagers such as Holden who have thought of suicide do not desire to die but they want to escape from the problems in their life that at that particular moment the impression of dying was the only way out. Holden often lies to himself to ease the emptiness and guilt he is living with that even Holden himself tells us that he “really felt like, committing suicide” (104). Even if we did not have the evidence that Holden was depressed through his actions of lying and having suicidal thoughts we still have the profound statement of all. What other way to prove that Holden Caulfield is depressed then Holden himself announcing that life itself “makes (him) so depressed” (75). Every single page of the novel is gorged with Holden telling us he is depressed. Whether it was Holden remembering someone say please and Holden commenting “that’s depressing” (211) or Holden warning us to never sleep in Grand Central, because “it’ll depress you,” (194) it is obvious that Holden is suffering from a mental illness.

Depression is a motif that appears from beginning to end during the novel. It’s evident from the way that he writes to the other motifs such as phony and loneliness that Holden is depressed. Holden’s depression is one of the larger contributors to his eventual mental breakdown. In Chapter 7, after having the fight with Stradlater, Holden had made up his mind, he decided “I'd get the hell out of Pencey – right that same night and all. I mean not wait till Wednesday or anything. I just didn't want to hang around any more. It made me too sad and lonesome. So what I decided to do, I decided I’d take a room in a hotel in New York – some very inexpensive hotel and all – just take it easy til Wednesday… Besides, I sort of needed a little vacation.

Depression is paralyzing, but mostly it is terrifying. In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield is displayed as a deeply sad person. He cannot handle the emotions that are plaguing him and thus projects them on everyone else. Holden is so terrified of his sadness he blames others for it, throughout the novel he constantly says phrases along the lines of, “they depress me”. His actions can be explained as a type of projection. Projection is defined as “ascribing our fear, problem... to someone else and then condemning him… in order to deny we have it ourselves,”(Tyson 14). His emotions have left him in a sanitarium where he is talking to a psychoanalysis, which is where his flashback begins.

First, Salinger shows that Holden is suffering from depression: “Boy, I felt miserable. I felt so depressed, you can’t imagine. What I did, I started talking, sort of out loud, to Allie. I do that sometimes when I get very depressed. I keep telling him to go home and get his bike and meet me in front of Bobby Fallon’s house.

‘The Catcher in the Rye’ is a classic novel set in the 1950’s. Holden Caulfield is a young 16 year old boy walking through life, hardships, and criticism towards life. Throughout Holden’s story, his odd behavior is displayed in a manner which opens the readers’ eyes to an entirely new persona. One that sees the worst in everything, one that doesn’t see the reality of things, a mind unable to decipher the beauty which the world holds within. Through his behavior and thoughts, the reader is led to believe that, from the start, there’s an abnormality to Holden’s thought process. His hopelessness and lack of motivation are signs of Major Depressive Disorder. Major depressive order is a mental health disorder characterized by mood swings,

In J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye, the main character, Holden Caufield, describes in detail the parts of his life and his environment that bother him the most. He faces these problems with a kind of naivety that prevents him from fully understanding why it is that he is so depressed. His life revolves around his problems, and he seems helpless in evading them. Among others, Holden finds himself facing the issues of acceptance of death, growing up, and his own self-destructiveness.

Instead of dealing with his problems Holden drank. This negatively affects him. Instead of getting help with his emotions he would drink them away so he would feel less. Drinking is seen persistently throughout the novel. Some may think that Holden has a severe drinking problem, which he does. A majority of his money is spent on alcohol at the bars he goes to. Holden is a minor and it is illegal for him to drink (57). Holden feels as if he is older when he drinks and likes the feeling because he does not want to be seen as one of the “phony” guys that he often speaks about throughout the novel. One night he gets so drunk he just does not know what is going on. It feels good for him. It is often mentioned that Holden drank when he had nothing else to do. He would stay out late because he wasn’t tired and had nothing else to do, and he was lonely. Holden feels a need to be drunk whenever he is around the “jerky preps” (85). He says “I can’t sit in a corny place like this cold sober” (70). He feels as if they are phony and he is unlike them. He often feels like getting out of the bars, but doesn’t because he doesn’t want to leave to become lonely. “I felt like getting out of the place. It was too depressing” (80).

In America, around twenty out of one hundred teenagers struggle with depression, and almost thirty percent will go untreated. J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye shines light on a young adolescent named Holden, calling awareness to his inner turmoil. Holden Caulfield might appear as the typical pessimistic teenager, however, he has a bad past that thrusts him into adulthood he never wanted. After the death of his little brother Allie, Holden fell into a dark hole and only keeps falling down further. Without any true role models, Holden is unequipped to handle his grief and refused to accept the past, depending on others for emotional support they are unable to give. Throughout the book, Holden's grapples with Allie’s death and searches for an eventual escape from his depression, causing him to grow as an individual. JD Salinger uses the symbol of rain to represent Holden's past, revealing that his journey through depression is rooted in his inability to move forward after Allie's death.