Brian Hoelscher
Jr. Theology/Faith
Was Holden Caulfield a Person of Faith?
It is hard to define a person, fictional or not, as a person of faith, because to have faith in someone else, that person needs to feel comfortable with the other person. Holden Caulfield from J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye has very little trust in those around him and because of this he develops “phony” relationships with the people he meets, such as lying about his name, age, and his reasons for leaving school, not letting people learn who he really is. Because people don’t learn who he is, they can’t be real with him, ultimately Holden is preventing himself from trusting others, and with all the lies he tells about himself, he starts to lose faith in his own actions, and to make up for this he tries to go back to his childhood, a time when he put complete faith in his older brother, Allie.
There is about two people Holden Caulfield has any faith in, but this faith is from the memories he has of the people, not from the people now. Those two people are his sister, Phoebe, and his old next door neighbor, Jane. He is always talking about how smart and able to understanding his sister is and how Jane wouldn’t have done anything in the basketball coach’s car with Stradlater, his roommate, but when he sees his sister when he gets home, she calls him out on his fantasy of becoming the catcher in the rye saying the song says “when a body meets a body” instead of “when a body catches a body.” Jane, who is never actually heard from in the book, because Holden never calls her, even though he says he should multiple times throughout the book, confirming that Holden doesn’t have as much faith in her as he lets on because subconsciously he is worried that she actually had sex with Stradlater, because Holden knows Stradlater’s “technique”.
One of the characters met later in the book, Mr. Antolini, who has the same mind set Holden has about children, gives him the opportunity to see that kids don’t want to be influenced by older people, but that is a different essay. The relationship Mr. Antolini has to Holden’s faith is that Holden had faith in his former English teacher, but got creped out when he woke up and found Mr. Antolini patting his head, which is similar to Holden watching his sister sleeping when he returned home.
The question, and also the title, of this essay still hasn’t been answered. Is Holden a person of faith? Holden dose have faith in many people throughout the book so the answer would be yes. But what dose it take to be a person of faith? To be a person of faith I guess you need to have faith, not only in the people around you, in your daily life, but that faith must have some reason for existing. What I’m trying to say is that to truly have faith in some one, you can not doubt them, and they can not be greater then what you believe them to be, you can’t be kidding yourself about that person, not that I’m saying you should let someone put you in an uncomfortable situation like Mr. Antolini did. But by this definition, Holden is not a person of faith, at least at the beginning of the book, but by the end he a genuine faith in Phoebe.