True Faith: Can Holden Caulfield find it?

By Jackson Ramsey

Holden Caulfield is not a person of faith. In my understanding, faith involves some form of belief—in someone or something. Holden is generally a cynical minded person, that is, almost everyone and everything he comes across he dismisses as being too “phony.” Holden distrusts the world around him and sees nothing that he really likes or that is genuinely good from his perspective. This distrust for his world is in itself a lack of faith because by definition trust the necessary key to having true faith. For this reason Holden can find nothing he values to put his faith in. However, he is not one to say that there is nothing out there worth believing in.

Although Holden has no faith in anything, he truly wants to find it somewhere. He knows that somewhere out there there is something or someone worth believing in; he just hasn’t gotten to it yet. Holden is a seeker, that is, he is the kind of person who will keep searching for some kind of faith until he finds it eventually. And in fact it is his lack of faith that makes him such a miserable person. Once he finds faith—(and my hope is that he finds it in God not in just in any random thing or in something harmful to himself like money or fame) once he finds true faith, especially in God, it will grow and eventually spill out over all other areas of his life and he will begin to be less cynical critical about the world. He will learn to love the world rather then to hate it. And he will begin to start to have faith in people and things that he couldn’t have before. Overall finding a true faith in God would make Holden overall a happier person. However Catcher in the Rye ends before we have a chance to see whether or not Holden finds this faith. Will he ever find it? God only knows.

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