Theme of Growing Up in Catcher in The Rye

A bildungsroman is a story about growing up, which centers around an account of a youthful grown-up developing ethically and mentally into a grown-up. Accordingly, a bildungsroman is additionally here and there called a novel of development or novel of training. The most significant component of a bildungsroman is the character improvement that the youthful grown-up experiences through the course of the story. Bildungsroman books like The Catcher in the Rye are famous in light of the fact that grown-up perusers can distinguish the developmental encounters in their own lives which helped them grow mentally.

J. D. Salinger is the author of the Catcher in the Rye and uses Holden to show society’s reaction to a “messed up teenager”. The idea of growing up is a controversial topic in the book since growing up has its pros and cons. This topic can touch upon many readers being that they can relate to the topic. Salinger depicts growing up as almost painful in the eyes of Holden. He needs everything to be effectively reasonable and everlastingly fixed, similar to the statues of Eskimos and Indians in the gallery. He is terrified in light of the fact that he is liable of the transgressions he censures in others, and on the grounds that he can’t comprehend everything around him.

In any case, he will not recognize this dread, communicating it just in a couple of cases, such as, when he talks about sex and admits that “sex is something I just don’t understand. I swear to God I don’t” (Chapter 9). Instead of acknowledging that adulthood scares and mystifies him, Holden invents a fantasy that adulthood is a world of superficiality and hypocrisy (“phoniness”), while childhood is a world of innocence, curiosity, and honesty.

Nothing uncovers his picture of these two universes superior to his dream about the catcher in the rye. He envisions adolescence as a pure field of rye in which youngsters cavort and play; adulthood, for the offspring of this world, is proportional to death; a lethal fall over the edge of a bluff. His made understandings of adolescence and adulthood permit Holden to cut himself off from the world by covering himself with a defensive shield of skepticism. In any case, as the book advances, Holden’s encounters, especially his experiences with Mr. Antolini and Phoebe, uncover the shallowness of his origins. ‘Phoniness,’ which is presumably the most popular expression from The Catcher in the Rye, is one of Holden’s preferred ideas. It is his catch-for depicting the triviality, lip service, demand, and shallowness that he experiences in his general surroundings.

Holden uses “phoniness” and many other expressions to describe his way of growing. Universally, growing up is something that everyone experiences and has their own opinions on, whether it is a positive or negative response. This is a significant part of human condition because every single person goes through growing up in their own way. Which isn’t surprising to be a common theme in a book about a teenager.

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