Kevin Murphy
Jr. Theology / Faith
August 22, 2007

  A Holy Holden?

              Faith, by definition, is the belief in something, whether it in God, an ethic or moral, or even another human being, faith is that complete and confident trust without having to know for sure what you trust in is real. Throughout the Catcher in the Rye, opportunities to place faith in these things are presented to Holden but he turns away from them with his own selfish reasoning in mind.

            From his days at the boarding school to his short stint in New York City, Holden feels he needs to push all other’s who reach out to him away. In every instance he hasn’t taken the time or the patience to know that person, to make an intimate connection. In everyone he found something he did not like and made it his focus. Whether it was his schoolmate Ackley and his bad hygiene, or Mr. Antolini who shows him kindness but Holden suspects him as some kind of pedophile for it. The only person he really ever made a connection to was Jane Gallagher. He connected to her on a different level than with others, she was the only one he showed he baseball mitt to. The mitt was given to him by his brother who had died years back and whom he, loved deeply. He had faith in her only after they shared time together; his faith was also propelled by his unpronounced and unbeknownst to him, sexual draw towards her. This was a trust built up, unlike the blind faith required when Mr. Antolini reached out to him. Like the people he meets, the ethics and values he encounters and the boarding school he rejects. While at his prep school, he finds he doesn’t need put forth in effort in the subjects he does not like such as history. He doesn’t trust that the values that he might learn from these classes, and school in general isn’t worth his time so he chooses to fail. He does not want to learn any of the values that you learn in school that prepare you for adult life, something that he is desperately running form. Finally, Holden turns away from God. A simple question posed to him by a roommate at an old boarding school is the first sign to us that Holden does not have faith in God. The boy asks him whether he knows where a local church is in town and Holden immediately judges him as someone who is “phony.”  While Christ came to cure the world of its own “phoniness,” Holden does not have the faith in God himself to save him. He considers the boy a “phony,” a boy who we are to assume is living in faith. He turns away from God, for he has never made the connection with him that he has made with Jane Gallagher, a connection that would allow him to love and trust God without ever having seen him. He needed to know God fully; we are to understand though that we cannot ever understand God fully.

            Holden Caulfield was not a man of faith because he refused to place himself in the trust of others. While he loved and had trust in others he never had a complete faith in anyone he met after his little brothers’ death because he could not trust in them fully without fully knowing them first.