“I could get a job at the filling station somewhere, putting gas and oil in people’s cars. I didn’t care what kind of job it was, though. Just so people didn’t know me and I didn’t know anybody.” This is a passage from The Catcher in the Rye which is a novel by J.D Salinger about a teenage boy, Holden Caufield, who is moving towards a mental break down. The novel is about Holden’s “Odyssey” through New York in search of his true self and acceptance from society. Through his “Odyssey” you can see Holden on a downward spiral gaining momentum as he falls due to his problems.
Holden is a very disturbed teenager. He thinks the world and almost everything in it is “phony.” He rejects the world around him because of its “phoniness” and fantasizes about his own world. When he meets people, he gives them fake identities to protect himself from exposing his true identity. This indicates that he regards himself as someone that the society rejects. He thinks that society doesn’t accept him and that he is a “reject” and as a form of defense, he rejects society and tries to escape it. Jim Steele is an identity that Holden likes to use a lot. In chapter 10, he uses the name Jim S
teele when he meets the three girls in the bar, and in chapter 13 he uses it again with the prostitute, Sunny. This means that Holden is trying to shield himself from his true fragile self. Holden mentions a couple of times how he is skinny and in chapter 13 he again mentions that he is sort of “yellow.” Steele sounds a bit like steel that can represent something hard and tough which is why he uses the name Jim Steele to cover his physical and mental weaknesses.
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