Holden’s Relationship with Women
The novel “The Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salinger is about a 17-year-old boy named Holden. Holden gets in a very bad condition after his younger brother Allie dies from Leukemia. He gets mentally ill and suffers from serious depression. Holden goes through tough times in which he has a lot of trouble finding friends and keeping good relationships. Relationship and sexuality are big motifs in the novel, which come up very often. Holden is always on the look for a new friend but he always turns away in the last moment. When Holden interacts with women in the novel, he is very different than when he interacts with men. The women characters in the book all are very important because they represent and …show more content…

However, Holden does show his immature side when he tries to get together with them but then it gets hard for him to respect girls who do not have the same ideals than him. When Holden meets Sally they spend time together like normal teenagers would do. They go to an ice rink to have some fun but at this point he was already very disrespectful. For example, Holden says about Sally “The kept walking ahead of me, so that I'd see how cute her little ass looked”(116). In this quote Holden says “her little ass” and it has a very bitter tone to it. It is already obvious that Holden does not like what she is doing and he builds on that until he explodes at the end. He has a conversation with her and finally leaves when she does not want to go away with him. When this happens it is clear that Holden is very serious about leaving and being alone. Another girl his age is Jane and he is deeply in love with her but throughout the book he doesn’t have the guts to talk to her. Holden says he will call Jane many times but since he never does the reader knows that the character is not developing. Since the beginning of the novel he has been saying this but he never had the will to do it. In some parts he stands up for Jane and feels the need to protect her like the incident with Stradlater. Another experience he had with a girl his age was with Sunny