Andrew Connor

Junior Theology/Faith

Wednesday August 22, 2007

 

Holden, a Person of Faith?

Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye is a complex person. He seemed not to be a person of faith but there were exceptions depending on who was involved. Holden doesn’t seem to try at school, coming up with excuses about why he was doing so poorly in all his classes with the exception of English which he passed. These excuses seem to show that he isn’t fully in faith with himself. He says that the reason he is failing is because of the teacher or the subject, but we never actually find out his study habits. He may believe that the subject is too hard at the beginning, so he won’t try saying no matter what he does he will fail, when actually he could pass if only he tried really hard to try and learn the subject.

            Holden parents want what’s best for him, and they show this by sending him to school after school trying to help him pass each grade and graduate high school. Because of his attitude however towards school he continuously fails out of his classes, having to go to a different school. This time when he failed out, he didn’t tell his parents till they got a note saying that he had failed out of the school. This shows that he doesn’t trust his parents, or that he is afraid of how they might punish him when they do find out about his failures in most of his classes. His parents give him reason to trust in them but he ignores it.

            He only shows faith in one person in his family. That person is his sister, Phoebe. Phoebe throughout the story is a person of intelligence. Holden, after he has been in New York for a couple of days, seeks out his sister so he can have an intelligent conversation. He has faith that she will be there for him, able to have an intelligent conversation with him when others cannot. Another reason he has faith in her, or trusts her is when he smokes in her room, so when his mother asks why it smells like smoke in the house she says she lit it to see what it was like. She stuck up for him when he could have gotten in lots of trouble. He has reason to trust her, to have faith in her and so he does.

            One person that Holden trusts, but then loses his faith in is his former teacher Mr. Antolini. Mr. Antolini takes Holden in when he has no where else to spend the night, which shows that he trusts Holden, that Holden won’t steal anything. In the middle of the night Holden wakes up and finds Mr. Antolini caressing his head, which freaks out Holden. He ends up going to the bus station and sleeping on the bench there. Mr. Antolini was just being fatherly to Holden but Holden lost the faith he had in Mr. Antolini.

            This just shows that Holden has the opportunities to trust or have faith in a large number of people, but he chooses not to. He can be a person of faith when it is dealing with someone he really cares about, like his sister, but he can also not be a person of faith just like how he doesn’t have faith in his family.