Holden Caufield as a Male SA Victim

 “Boy, I was shaking like a madman. I was sweating, too. When something perverty like that happens, I start sweating like a bastard. That kind of stuff’s happened to me about twenty times since I was a kid. I can’t stand it,” (Salinger, 251).

J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is a renowned coming-of-age novel focused on the story of Holden Caulfield and his daily endeavours following his expulsion from Pencey Prep. The novel is told in a first-person narrative by Holden, giving the readers a unique look into his inner monologue. We get well acquainted with him throughout the book— his way of thinking, what he likes, what he dislikes (though he has considerably more dislikes than likes). He goes off into tangents very easily about what he witnesses in things and people. Notably though, Holden doesn’t talk about himself as much as you’d assume, seeing that the story is told from his perspective. I feel that one of the most important scenes in the book, if not the most important in understanding Holden’s character, went entirely overlooked due to Holden’s passiveness and inability to talk about the uncomfortable truths of his own lived experiences. To me, this was the unnerving scene with Mr. Antonlini. 

When Holden wakes up on Mr. Antolini’s couch to his former teacher stroking his head, his reaction is telling. He panics when faced with the situation at hand, rushes to leave, and immediately attempts to rationalize what he had just witnessed and felt. At this point in the book, Holden is arguably in his most vulnerable state, having left Phoebe and his home, roaming the streets of NYC with no one else to turn to but Mr. Antolini. Holden speaks highly of him, recounting the kindness he offered James Castle, the boy who committed suicide at Elkton Hills. He only has a few people like that he’s spoken of in such a high regard, and almost none of the same age as Mr. Antolini (with the exception of the nuns, but Jane, Allie, Phoebe, and James Castle, all either being dead or not at the point of adulthood). His caricature of Mr. Antolini is so hurtfully wrong to Holden and to the reader. Holden, this very self-assured guy who feels as though he understands his peers and those around him, has been thrown an utter curveball neither he nor the reader had expected. 

“I wondered if just maybe I was wrong about thinking he was making a flitty pass on me. I wondered if maybe he just liked to pat guys on the head when they’re asleep,” (Salinger, 253). 

Even when faced with something as uncomfortable as what Holden had to go through, he’s reluctant to put the blame on Mr. Antolini. He tells us readers that he himself may have misunderstood the situation, and that there isn’t a sure way to always know with those things. When thinking about the scene through a modern lens, his quick and almost instinctive self-blame/minimization reminds me of the unfortunate truth that many SA victims (particularly the male victims) second-guess themselves as they’ve been conditioned to doubt their own perception. Crucially, to understand Holden’s character, he tells us that this sort of thing has happened to him “about twenty times since (he) was a kid,” (Salinger, 251). As readers, we know to take whatever numerical exaggeration Holden spews with a grain of salt, but in this instance, even a less dramaticized number would still tell us that he’s repeatedly experienced this behavior in the past. The last part of that line, “-since (he) was a kid,” hurts as bad as it did because Holden is still a child, even though he doesn’t really see himself in that way. Holden’s reaction and rationalization tell the reader of his deeply ingrained belief that what happens to him has to be his fault, or at least it isn’t serious enough to confront. He finds it grotesque and stands up for others in the same or similar positions, but not quite himself.

By understanding the way Holden processes these incidents, it helps us as his confidante to understand his complex relationship with sex throughout the novel. He is deeply uncomfortable with sexual situations, despite his attempts to convince us otherwise. Holden talks about how he can never pressure a girl to have sex with him after they’ve told him “no,” and he frames this as a fault of his own. He likes to make himself up as mature, by drinking, smoking, and hiring prostitutes, but for all the talk he has about sex, upon rereading it’s easy to see how he panics when intimacy becomes real. With Sunny, the young prostitute, Holden is deeply saddened by her age and in his mind, her stolen youth. His relationship with Jane Gallagher also supports this idea. Holden idolizes this old Jane he once knew as being the epitome of everything good in this world. He sees her as ‘pure,’ fixating on her small, innocent attributes like keeping her kings in the back row while playing checkers, her attentiveness to listen when told about Allie’s baseball glove, and most importantly, what I think connects him to Jane the most, the fact that she cried when her stepfather behaved inappropriately. It’s strongly implied that Jane was abused by her stepfather, and Holden’s protective nature over her through this new lens points to the fact that he identifies with her, and that it may be the stem of his affection. Holden sees Jane as someone fragile and almost ‘too good for this world,’ as if she’s in need of protection. This is why he got so upset with Stradlater, as he’s known to defile girls with no regard for them as people, swapping dates out as he pleases. 

Holden’s obsession with purity extends far beyond Jane. He idealizes childhood innocence, seeing this embodied in Allie, Phoebe, and D.B. at one point in time. Similarly, he values the nuns he meets in the same way, as well as James Castle, who depict innocence and nobility in a little bit of a different way, through rejecting the evils of the world. Holden fantasizes about being the “catcher in the rye,” saving children from falling off the cliff into the corrupt world of adulthood. He associates adulthood with phoniness, predation, and the taking of innocence. Children haven’t been touched (literally and metaphorically) by the appalling nature of mankind, making them in need of protection that much more. What Holden fails to realize is that he is a kid too, with his innocence unjustly stolen, and he deserved that protection just as much as the children do.