Holden and the Fear of Change

Scared of the fact that time will never stop and right now, as you’re reading this, you’ll never be younger than you are now? Yeah, me too, and so is Holden. Throughout Catcher in the Rye, it becomes increasingly clear that Holden is trying to avoid the future and stay in the present, longing to somehow hold onto every part of his childhood that he can. This refusal of transience can be profoundly seen through his descriptions of people he admires that we as readers are never able to actually meet -- Jane and Allie. His memories with these two people are ingrained in his mind, and no longer contacting them allows him to overthink and often causes the outward spiraling of his emotions.

Throughout this novel, Jane Gallagher is mentioned countless times but never actually encounters Holden at any point in this narrative. In Chapter III, Stradlater, while shaving before his date with Jane, mentions that she is downstairs waiting while he gets ready for their date, and Holden decides (after a brief moment of genuine excitement of her presence) to not say hello to her. This frustrated me at first, but when I started understanding Holden’s principles and his value of the present, I sympathized with Holden. Change is scary. Seeing an old friend (partner, in his case? Who needs labels anyway) after a long period without contact can be frightening, because you never can know how much they’ve changed since you last met --physically and emotionally. For all he/we know, she could have lost all the hand-holding, kings-in-the-back-row innocence that Holden so admired in her during their childhood. By choosing not to visit her in the present, his memory of her stays as it always was in his mind, her pure chastity and emotional accountability staying untouched insofar as Holden is aware. This is also why Holden is so frustrated with the “unscrupulous” Stradlater after he comes back from his date with Jane -- he wouldn’t tell Holden what they did except for sitting in “the goddam car” and calling their interactions a “professional secret” (43). Because of these implications that they were necking (and maybe more) in the car, Holden is distraught with the ideas that 1) Stradlater probably tried to treat her like an object that he could “use”,  which bothers him because Holden knows that “you don’t always have to get too sexy to know a girl” (that girl being Jane), and 2) he realizes that Jane Gallagher really has lost that virtuous innocence from their childhood, tinting the image of her genuineness in Holden’s mind (76).

Allie, though his relationship with Holden was worlds different from that of Jane’s, held an arguably similar position in Holden’s mind as Jane. In Chapter 14, Holden gets extremely “depressed” after his situation with Sunny, and begins speaking to Allie. He reflects on a day when he and his friend Bobby were riding bikes:  “Allie heard us talking about it, and he wanted to go, and I wouldn’t let him. I told him he was a child. So once in a while, now, when I get very depressed, I keep saying to him, ‘Okay. Go home and get your bike and meet me in front of Bobby’s house.’” This little window into Holden’s mind is telling in that he regrets not spending that moment with him, regretting his excuse being that his brother shouldn’t hang out with him because of his young age. Now, after Allie’s sudden death from leukemia, Holden realizes that this youth that Allie had was something to embrace, as he comes to realize that no one knows when their last moment with their loved ones might be. This is a major reason why Holden wants to hold on to his own youth (ie., by failing all his classes in school as a form of rejection of his future) and has such a difficult time with transience. In Holden's mind, Allie will always be the ambitious 12 year old he's grown up with, eyes filled with youthful eagerness as he waits for Holden to come home from his bike ride.

Through choosing not to meet with Jane and not having the ability to meet with Allie, Holden finds ways not to deal with change and the hard truth that things will never stay the same. This can be paralleled with him distracting himself with booze, drugs, failing his classes, and calling up people to waste time -- all things that take his mind off of his internalized grief for Allie's death as well as his own race against time. As long as Holden doesn't see the change, it never happened.