Holden’s relationships with different characters.

In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield travels to New York and comes across different kinds of persons which he acts in various behaviours against. How can it come that he acts this way? What is the difference between all these individuals? We have chosen three different characters which Holden runs into during his journey.

Ernst Mother
When Holden is on the train to New York he meets an elder good-looking lady which starts a conversation with him. When their conversation escalates he get to know that she is the mother of his classmate Ernst Morrow which he doesn’t like at all. “Her son was doubtless the biggest bastard that ever went to Pencey, in the whole crumby history of the school. He was always going down the corridor. After he’d had a shower, snapping his soggy old wet towel at people’s asses” [s.48].
Instead of telling her the truth about Ernst behaviour when she asks, he chose to talk positive about him, for her benefit only. He says things that he knows a mother wants to hear and we think that this is because of the fact that he wants the conversation to keep on going and at the same time he doesn’t want her to get sad.
She asks him about his name and he answers Rudolf Schmidt which is the janitor of his dorm instead of telling her his real name. We think that he does this because he doesn’t want Ernst to know that he has talked to his mother but also because he doesn’t want to be a part of a conflict or being a part of anything at all, really. He seems like a guy that doesn’t want the sun to shine on him. The meeting with Ernst mother let us know that he’s a nice guy. This time he lied to make another individual feel good, a female individual.

The elevator guy and the hooker
After a long night in New York he decides to go back to his hotel room. In the elevator the elevator guy starts to talk with him and asks him how old he is. Twenty-two says Holden and that’s a big lie. The elevator guy offers him a hooker for five bucks a throw and Holden agrees to this. He went to his room to fresh himself up, combs his hair and checks his breath, just for the girl. The hooker arrives to his hotel room and she wants to get going right away and she pulls her dress over her head. [S.85-86] “I certainly felt peculiar when she did that. I mean she did it so sudden and all. I know you are supposed to feel pretty sexy when somebody gets up and pulls their dress over their head, but I didn’t. Sexy was about the last thing I was feeling. I felt much more depressed than sexy” Why was he feeling depressed? Maybe because she didn’t mean something to him, it was just right on and that wasn’t what he was looking for.
The girl still wants to get going but Holden tries to start a conversation instead. When the failure hits him he decides that this was a stupid idea and he wants to pay her the five bucks and then let her go. Instead of accepting his five bucks she starts to get irritating. It’s ten that he’s supposed to pay. She walks away with five and later on she comes back with her pimp. They demand ten. With a crackly voice Holden explains that it really was five. It ends with Holden getting a big smack and a couple of argues later Holden surrender and pays.
His relationship with the girl is easy to read off. He wants a feeling, something else than just pure sex. He tries to talk with the girl who doesn’t respond to his will. He chickens out. He just can’t do it. So instead of doing something nasty he pays her and let her go without her having to do anything. By reading about his relationships with the girl and the guy we can see that he is much friendlier against the girl even if she doesn’t behave that good against him. Against the pimp he’s very upright and he’s not willing to give up, not until he gets smacked and the man gets more aggressive.

Sally
Sally is a girl that Holden has a meeting with. In a conversation Holden says that he wants them to run away and leave everything behind. She turns down his offer and it ends with Holden saying [s.120] “You give me a royal pain in the ass, if you want to know the truth”.
She starts to cry and Holden gets scared and “apologizes like a madman”.
He’s afraid of Sally’s father, if she was going to tell him about what he said to her. Then, suddenly, he starts to laugh. She gets even angrier and he starts to apologize a little bit more than earlier. She turned down his offer and then he say, in the book, that he wasn’t supposed to go with her even if she would have said yes. He also keeps calling himself a madman.
How can we read of this? He starts with being nice against her and then he says something stupid and in the next minute he is overnice and apologizes EVEN though he doesn’t regret what he said. Maybe it is because she was crying, maybe because she was a girl.

Summary
In the whole book Holden acts on a different particular way against all different individuals.
All these characters play an important role; they help us to understand how he is working. It seems like he has multiple personalities. Against some of the characters, like Ernst mother, he does everything to make her happy. Talks with her and lies to make her feel good about her son even though he could decide not to talk about Ernst at all. With the hooker he just wanted to be nice, with Sally to. When things went wrong he let them have right. He bends down for them. He apologizes to Sally and pays the prostitute. All these characters we’ve mention in this paragraph until now is females. How was it about the brothel-keeper? He didn’t just give up them. For a while it seemed like he never would but at last, he didn’t have a choice.

How can it come that he acts on this different ways? We can guess about his childhood that we don’t know that much about. A dead brother, a little sister, a big brother and his parents. Perhaps a dad that didn’t care about him and that ends up with him not being so tolerate and loving against grown ups and males. However it is, we are pretty sure that he looks at children and women as something better and more sensitive than men. On the other hand, don’t all men do that?


Veronica & Rebecka (: