Holden's Defense Mechanism
In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield often finds himself alone. He is constantly looking for someone to talk to or just hang out with. Every time he is by himself, Holden tries to find someone, even if he doesn’t know them that well, that he could talk to.
In the beginning of chapter 9, after Holden gets off the train in New York, the first thing he does is go to the phone booth. He goes through the list of everyone he knows, debating whether he should call them. He thinks about D.B., Phoebe, Jane Gallagher, Sally Hayes, and Carl Luce, even though Holden doesn’t even like him. Even though he doesn’t end up calling anyone, this scene shows how desperate Holden is to talk to someone.
Holden even tries to talk to the cab driver. He asks him if he knows where the ducks in the lagoon go in the wintertime. The driver doesn’t know and gets annoyed at Holden. But still, Holden, desperate for a friend, asks the driver to join him for a drink. When the driver says no, Holden sarcastically comments “He certainly was good company. Terrific personality” (79). A couple of lines before though, all Holden wanted to do was hang out with the cab driver. But, when he refuses, Holden complains about the driver.
I think that this is a sort of defense mechanism. Holden will do anything to have someone hang out with him. But, when they reject him, he gets defensive, like he did here. Holden insults everyone he meets so that when they don’t talk to him, he doesn’t feel bad about himself. If Holden can convince himself that the cab driver was a bad conversationalist, then we won’t care as much that they didn’t get to hang out.
He does this with many of the other characters in the book. When Ackley doesn’t let Holden sleep in his room after his fight with Stradlater, Holden gets mad again. He gives Ackley “a big, phony handshake” and leaves the “stupid atmosphere” (65). Holden doesn’t like it when Ackley comes into his room unannounced and often ignores him. But, Holden can’t deal with it when even Ackley doesn’t want to talk to him. Because he doesn’t want to be hurt, Holden automatically resorts to his defense mechanism: he calls Ackley stupid and leaves his room.
Throughout this book, Holden is continuously trying to make friends with anyone and everyone he meets. But, when they don’t want to talk to him, he calls them “phonies” as a way to make himself feel better. If they’re all phonies anyway, it doesn’t matter that they don’t want to hang out with him.
I totally agree. I think that you said it way better than I could have and did a good job showing the reasoning behind your argument. I hadn't quite thought about him calling people "phonies" this way but it makes a lot of sense.
ReplyDeleteYou really nail down Holden's essential conundrum here: he is desperately lonely, in large part because he *doesn't* want to think about his current situation and his general deep-seated qualms with adult society, and he wants to distract himself with good conversation, which for him means "shooting the breeze" about anything *other* than what he's going through. But he is so easily disappointed by others, in ways that remind him of the very thing he's trying so hard to avoid, that talking to others only ends up making him more isolated and alone. It's true that his reflexive denunciation of anything that rubs him the wrong way as "phony" can be seen as a defense mechanism, at the same time, he's reacting to some real stuff. It's an impossible situation: he wants authenticity and realness when he talks to others, but he doesn't want it to get *too* real, as when he denounces Luce once Luce starts challenging his "typical Caulfield" attitude and calling him out on his immaturity. In fact, we realize that Holden actually wants to *revel* in his lingering immaturity, as a kind of antidote to maturity, but we see how tedious this act can be when viewed by an outsider. "Typical Caulfield," as Luce puts it.
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