Holden Caulfield

[SillySapienne]

Bring it.

You seem to be forgetting that INTJ is shorthand for 'incorrigible being.'

I have an exam tomorrow on three chapters in which I have yet to read, so I will be a bit delayed in my bringing it and hence beating the incorrigibleness out of your very being, so enjoy your throne of righteous ignorance while you can.

 

[JivinJeffJones]

I mean, when somebody says "wins the internet", do they actually get the internet delivered to them on their doorstep the next day?

Because if you do, I'm still waiting on it.

 

[SillySapienne]

OMG!!!!

FUCK, I AM SUPPOSED TO BE STUDYING!!!!

I already have five _NFP money excerpts and I have only gone through 60 pages.

SOOOOOOOOOO GOOD!!!

Gah!!!

Nostalgia.

 

[Haphazard]

CaptainChick, why did this book change your life?

 

[SillySapienne]

CaptainChick, why did this book change your life?

It didn't change my life but it did have a profound affect on me. (lol, so perhaps it did)

I was 16 when I first read it and I read it in one sitting, taking my time with it, rereading passages that I found to be almost eerily comforting and familiar. I identified with Holden to such an extent that it was the first time that I *truly* felt connected to someone.

I understood him, I felt him, and he was not crazy but in fact was rather quite sane!!!

As an idealist, the existential depression that ensued after my "fall from innocence" was an incredibly painful one, and this pain was not in vain, for I was not the only one...

An intelligent idealist is an agonizing thing to be at times.

The older we become, the less real and authentic our lives become.

Gah, Fi overload, to be continued...

 

[Haphazard]

You identified with Holden Caufield?

...I'm sorry.

 

[strawberryfields]

How disappointing, when you said I won the thread I was going to say "Who says INTJ's can't admit when they're wrong?"

I identified with Holden Caulfield too, to a degree, and I don't need any sympathy. Merci for saying I made some good points I am fully open to the idea you disagree with me on good merit, but I'd like it if you substantiated your position that he's an ISTP with reference to the book. I'm also presuming you disagreed with some of the conclusions I reached since I think he's an NFP, which bits did you disagree with?

Oh dear my laptop just burned my leg... never good!

 

[Haphazard]

How disappointing, when you said I won the thread I was going to say "Who says INTJ's can't admit when they're wrong?"

Ah, there we go again! My claims can be 'unsubstantiated,' but it would be well, wrong, to call them wrong.

I identified with Holden Caulfield too, to a degree, and I don't need any sympathy. Merci for saying I made some good points I am fully open to the idea you disagree with me on good merit, but I'd like it if you substantiated your position that he's an ISTP with reference to the book. I'm also presuming you disagreed with some of the conclusions I reached since I think he's an NFP, which bits did you disagree with?

Okay, where to start...

I think he's an xNFP, leaning more towards I than E by just a little. I adore that book, and read it six times within the first year of picking it up, and I did my english research project on it when I was at school and got full marks. (I am not saying that to say 'whoa I'm awesome!' I just mean I think people *can* have a different perspective to you, and know the book well.)

I'm an NFP and I identified with him, certainly. I think calling him an S is to totally misunderstand him.

NFP would mean that he had Ne. I see a lot more Se than Ne. He's more an opportunist in nature than what I've seen of Ne types (particularly INPs).

A huge element of that book is that Holden is confused and lost, since he is asking big questions about the world and not finding answers. Think of the ever famous ducks; Holden is asking questions about them because on an intuitive level he feels a connection with them. He desperately seeks to 'connect' with people, and Mr Antolini is clearly an N and that is a teacher who's had a great deal of influence over him.

And yet he immediately runs when he starts to think that he's a 'flit'. For the connection to be broken so easily doesn't seem, well, very NFP-ish.

Holden despises 'phoniness' and part of that is shallowness and convention. Of course he fails to truly grapple with peoples motives, and ironically is a bit of a hypocrite as a result, but I think J.D Salinger wants to portray Holden as someone who in a sense realises he's a hypocrite. He feels lost in the world and isolates himself by feeling different to everyone else and labelling it because of their phoniness. But his insights can be incredibly perceptive -particularly about people -

He is? What I saw was a closed system, when he thought about people.

and he obviously has a lot of depth. He loves fiction and getting caught up in another world through reading a book, again that seems fairly NF to me; escapism through literature.

I think he's an NF; he seems to fit the idealist portrait. He's obviously highly traumatised by the death of his younger brother, and has an emotional response to that (smashing all the windows in the garage).

Having an emotional response like this I don't think can be monopolized by NF types.

He has a strong sense of how the world 'ought' to be,

Introverted judgment. IxxP.

and has a deep caring side which is demonstrated in how he treats his sister and the fact at regular times in the book there are people who he empathises and sympathises with (the Head teachers daughter, Ackley, Jane). Holden really values the nuns for altruistically caring for others, and what he perceives as authenticity; desire for authenticity is very NF.

In terms of I/E, I think it's difficult to tell because Holden is depressed and that has a natural impact on whether or not you appear extroverted. He certainly has extroverted traits; he seeks out the company of others throughout the book, sometimes people he doesn't even know very well, and obviously has a wide circle of acquaintances. However, I think part of that is in hope they will elucidate things for him and help him to understand why he is as he is, and at other times he simply wants distraction from how bad he feels. I think he's possibly an I though, since he's very introspective, wants time alone, reads a lot, sometimes can't be bothered with humanity as a whole, and seeks deep meaningful connections on a one-on-one level. I think he is hesitant to share his inner world with others, which can also be an introverted thing. I am not sure socialising for the sake of socialising would appeal to him. The log cabin fantasy at the end could be seen as an introverted thing, but I think that's his idea of the ultimate way of cutting himself off from humanity in order to avoid pain. There's a great paradox throughout the book; Holden longs for people to understand and accept him, but equally he despises many elements of the human condition and isolates himself from people. He spends the book vacillating between the two, hence E/I being difficult to determine.

I see nobody has questioned if he's a P, I think that's pretty self-evident

I think this book is grossly misunderstood. Teenagers who say 'I love Holden, finally someone who understands me!' and adults who say 'What a whiny brat', in my opinion, miss J.D Salinger's point. I don't think J.D Salinger is endorsing everything Holden says. You're *meant* to recognise that Holden is a bit of a hypocrite and isolating himself from the world through a pseudo-superiority complex. I think you're meant to look beyond that and question why he is so lost, and it particularly relates back to unexpressed grief regarding his brother and other traumatic events. I can genuinely say that 'The Catcher in the Rye' is the only fictional book to change my life, not 'cause I agreed with Holden, but cause I saw elements of himself he was blind to that related to moi.

This last part made me very happy.

I know this isn't very substantial... but let me try to state my point.

His voice sounds like an ISTP. I can't quite put my finger on why. He takes advantage of everything he finds (except for girls -- and I think the only reason why he seems 'extroverted' at all is because of this). I know there's the stereotype that STPs don't read, but I know enough to know otherwise. They can end up in existentialism...

Now there's the question as to where the trauma came from. I guess one could say that it was all his little brother, but I got the impression that it was more diffuse than that. His brother may have started the spiral, but after that it just got worse.

What I see is that the guy had a framework that developed a few cracks when his brother died, and then it just got weaker and weaker from there, until it finally just broke, and he was still trying to use it (thus the constant hypocrisy).

Whether this original framework was more Fi or Ti with a layer of awful Fe over it, I can't tell. The thing is that I just don't see any standards as to how Caufield's approval can be reached. If there is Fi, there must be Te -- no matter how awful or corrupted.

I wonder if I make any sense?

 

[Magic Poriferan]

You identified with Holden Caufield?

...I'm sorry.

That is the fundamental answer as to why anyone likes that book, that they "identify" with it. That is by far the most common response when asked why the book is good, and I've never heard it said even remotely as often about any other book, or story at all for that matter.

That's fascinating and confusing to me. I didn't relate to Holden much at all, and I kind of hated him. It's not a very long book, but I slogged through it in like two weeks. Characters aside, I thought the whole story was really boring and hated the way it was told. But anyway, my ENFP friend says it's one of her favorite books and (surprise, surprise) she said she had this "I'm not alone moment" when she first read it. I then told her that I found Holden insufferably irritating in his hypocracy, inconsistency, and lack of reasoning. I also thought he was self-absorbed.

The main things I and Holden seemed to have in common is that we both hated society, and felt a lot of frustration, but that's it. Those are only two, rather general things. Our way of handling those opinions are entirely different. One of my theories is that being home-schooled has made it harder for me to connect with him. Maybe his experiences with public school and it's impact on his life (which is apparently very large) is one of the things that people relate to, and it's one that I obviously wouldn't know. One thing that struck me as funny though, was that my friend defended a number of Holden's character flaws by saying "he's only seventeen". I said, "yeah?..."
I was eighteen when I read the book, and I could tell you I was more mature than Holden when I was fifteen...

 

[SillySapienne]

FWIW: My INTJ best friend in high school absolutely loved Catcher in the Rye , too.

"Take cars," I said. I said it in this very quiet voice. "Take most people, they're crazy about cars. They worry if they get a little scratch on them, and they're always talking about how many miles they get to a gallon, and if they get a brand-new car already they start thinking about trading it in for one that's even newer. I don't even like old cars. I mean they don't even interest me. I'd rather have a goddamn horse. A horse is at least human, for God's sake. A horse you can at least-"

"I don't know what you're even talking about," old Sally said. " You jump from one-"

<more dialog>

""You ought to go to a boy' school sometime. Try it sometime," I said. " It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddamn Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddamn cliques. The guys that are on the basketball team stick together, the Catholics stick together, the goddamn intellectuals stick together, the guys that play bridge stick together. Even the guys that belong to the goddamn Book-of-the-Month Club stick together. If you try to have a little intelligent-"

 

[SillySapienne]

I'm not too sure what the name of the song was that he was playing when I came in, but whatever it was, he was really stinking it up. He was putting all these dumb, show-offy ripples in the high notes, and a lot of other very tricky stuff that gives me a pain in the ass. You should've heard the crowd, though, when he was finished. You would've puked. They went mad. *They were exactly the same morons that laugh like hyenas in the movies at stuff that isn't funny.* I swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I'd hate it. I wouldn't even want them to clap for me. *People always clap for the wrong things*

If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddamn closet.

 

[Haphazard]

One thing that struck me as funny though, was that my friend defended a number of Holden's character flaws by saying "he's only seventeen". I said, "yeah?..."
I was eighteen when I read the book, and I could tell you I was more mature than Holden when I was fifteen...

I tend to not identify with people.

I read this book for the second time at 16 -- I can't really count the first time because I was too young. But even so, I do not identify with him.

It's more disgust and pity towards the character I feel. But mostly... pity. And it's not easy to earn my pity.

And CaptainChick, if it pleases, will you tell me what the Hell you're doing?

 

[SillySapienne]

Lol, I am prepping. I am going to analyze those in a sec.

And lol, my close friend in high school couldn't stand Holden and neither could my English teacher.

The truth is this, there is in fact a select few of us human beings who are, for reasons unknown, genetically predisposed and hard-wired towards being empathetic idealists.

Sensitive souls do not fare well in this cold, industrialized, bureaucratic, super colony we call modern civilization.

When you actually care about people and things, and the inherent fucked-upness and seemingly endless human suffering deeply lodged and integrated in a society that basically functions and operates on dissociating its people from one and other into foreign and discrete factions in order for designated people to exploit "other" designated people strictly for selfish gain from just far enough of a distance so as to not affect everyone's ability to sleep at night, well, when you care in a system that cares not for you or anything really, that is, to say the very least, incredibly difficult to bite, swallow and chew.

Tangent, sorry :/

 

[Magic Poriferan]

I strenously object to the notion that I do not have empathy, ideals, or an awareness of how much is wrong in the world, just because I despise Holden Caulfield. His conceit and his inability to critical analyze his own personality (and largely that of others, to tell you the truth) is one of the things I dislike about him. It has little to do with him being empathic or idealistic.

 

[SillySapienne]

Oy vey, you just love jumping to (false) conclusions, doncha MP!!!

 

[Haphazard]

Holden Caufield is stuck in an infinite loop. He does not know enough to get out, and he does not know how he got in -- in fact, he does not know he's stuck at all. And yet, there he is, slowly losing everything, intensely aware of every stinging pain yet oblivious to those he inflicts on others...

There is a time to cry, and there is a time to at least try to pick one's self up. All he's succeeds in doing is hurting himself and systematically locking himself in further.

He has two exits: maturity, or death. By the fact that he ends up in therapy, the best part of it is that he ends up with the better exit... but then again, you never know.

There is no sign of anything gained when he's telling the story. He just says that he ends up sick and in therapy... there are no embellishments to the story to give the impression that he's learned anything. So, I cannot help but pity him.

 

[Nonsensical]

I tend to think of him maybe as an INFP, but I hear what everyone's saying..

 

[Cimarron]

Any more thoughts?

CaptainChick, any chance that you'd want to continue that exploration?

 

[Haphazard]

Any more thoughts?

CaptainChick, any chance that you'd want to continue that exploration?

What about your thoughts, Cimarron?

My thoughts are already splattered all over this thread like blown out brains on a Jackson Pollock painting. I don't believe it needs any more.

 

[Cimarron]

Yes, I was looking for new input. You've contributed quite a bit.

I suppose if one takes him to be a reliable narrator, he's Fi, but if he's unreliable, he's totally, totally, totally bad Fe. Depends on interpretation.

I almost mentioned this in my last post. I thought this was a good observation, and yet CaptainChick's post reminded me that the narration seemed "honest." At least Holden seemed to be as honest with himself as he could, limited maybe by his ability to understand himself and his own motives.

People are making some good points on all sides.

I was thinking maybe ISFP, but that would concede to Fi being the stronger factor, and that debate wasn't quite closed.