Holden Caulfield and Capitalism
Why did Holden lose his path? Other blogs will provide other answers. Holden is, as is pointed out in the book, a ripe subject of psychoanalysis. I propose that Holden Caulfield’s lost state is, at least in part, resultant from his interactions with the status of capitalism. Throughout The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield presents the figure of a man (or, really, a boy) lost- he has rejected the mainstream, consumerist-industrialist, all-American path of [high school college job wife kids family], associating it with the “phoniness” and seeking flight from it on many occasions. Holden makes his disdain for consumerist industrial capitalism clear from the start. On the second page of the book, he says of his brother D.B. “He's got a lot of dough, now. He didn't use to. He used to be just a regular writer, when he was home . . . Now he's out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute.” D.B. is not a literal prostitute- that would be something of an odd career choice given hi