MATURITY LINKED TO SEXUAL ACTIVITIES
1. Holden strives to be considered “mature” and in doing this, he makes a fool of himself most of
the time. His idea of maturity is leaving school, talking like an adult, smoking cigarettes, and
inviting adults out to bars with him even though he is too young to drink. Holden hardly breaks
the surface of what maturity means, because he is solely focused on what maturity looks like.
The dichotomy between perception and reality is where Holden gets himself into the most
trouble, and overall leads him to be misunderstood and lonely.
2. Holden really struggles to maintain his mature persona when it comes to matters of sexuality.
There is no space in which Holden is comfortable engaging in sexual acts, though in order to
present himself as mature, he talks as though he has sexual experience. He clearly is struggling
under the pressure of feeling he should be experienced, and feels the need to justify why he is
still a virgin and why the other boys his age are not. “If you want to know the truth, I’m a virgin. I
really am” he then explains why,
- The thing is, most of the time when you’re coming pretty close to doing it with a girl-a girl that
isn’t a prostitute or anything, I mean- she keeps telling you to stop. The trouble with me is, I
stop. Most guys don’t (103).
What Holden says is problematic, though he does not view the problem as a problem and is
embarrassed of his own moral compass. This reveals the strong cultural importance placed on
sexual experience as a person is coming of age. Through describing Holden’s feelings about
situations that can best be described as non-consensual for the girls involved, Salinger is
revealing a societal trend of not respecting the other sexual partner’s desires, and being blinded
by the social construct of virginity, and the desire to “be mature” and lose it.
ALLUSIONS
chapter 24
"I expected to see a day-old infant in your arms. Nowhere to turn. Snowflakes in your
eyelashes.”
This is the depiction of femininity in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, which often
displays women as damsels in distress who need to be rescued.
chapter 25
Everybody's think I was just a poor deaf-mute bastard and they’d leave me alone . . . and I’d
build me a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life. I’d
build it right near the woods, but not right in them, because I’d want it to be sunny as hell all the
time. I’d cook all my own food[.]
This is an allusion to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods , published in 1854,
which depicts Thoreau’s choice to leave society and live in semi-isolation in a cabin at Walden
Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, for just over two years.
FORESHADOWING
When he leaves his house after talking with Phoebe, he wishes his parents would wake up and
find him: “I figured if they caught me, they caught me. I almost wished they did, in a way.” Then,
when Phoebe makes him promise to go home instead of running away, he tells us “I really did
go home afterward.” Throughout the novel, Holden has been attempting to resist the draw of his
childhood home, and in the end, he gives in.